What is PolyCloud? The Platformisation of Hybrid Cloud

StrategyNext and Innovatus Media are observing an emergence of challenges posed by hybrid cloud. Could a PolyCloud approach be the future solution for a holistic view?

Cloud adoption has hit the mainstream in Northern Europe, with 75% of Sweden and Finland’s enterprises adopting at least one cloud technology service. During the pandemic, few buzzwords filled the virtual boardroom more than “scalable”, “adaptable” and “cost-effective”.

As enterprises hit cloud maturity and choice drives a dispersion amongst applications, CTOs face the question that keeps them up at night: what do we do next?
Recent innovations in AI and ML are being sought after to manage these complex cloud infrastructures. But – perhaps more excitingly – we’re also starting to put “PolyCloud” in the spotlight.

What is PolyCloud?

PolyCloud extends the concept of multi-cloud by pulling specialised services from various vendors and merging them into one application. For instance, it enables storing your data on AWS while tapping into Google Cloud Platform’s AI capabilities. This approach leverages each vendor’s strengths, offering amalgamated applications with the best capabilities.

With the increasing popularity of AI in application development, the move towards vendor specialisation shouldn’t come as a surprise. For AI products to generate real business value, generic models trained on large swaths of data will need to be replaced with narrow, specific use cases (Emergence).

PolyCloud’s granularity provides an opportunity to create unique applications and gain a competitive edge in a crowded market. If done right, it can also prove cost effective as resources get allocated where they’ll perform best.

There’s always a risk, of course, in relying on interconnected vendors to work with each other. Including potential impacts on application performance, downtime and increased complexity in management.

Moving forward, a comprehensive visibility strategy and predictive capabilities to anticipate outages will be crucial for navigating the next phase of cloud innovation.

What are they saying about PolyCloud?

“The polycloud means I’m actually using multiple cloud providers, and then I’m using them in the best way possible for my workloads, with a common layer that I can orchestrate with a certain logic” Marco Argenti, CIO at Goldman Sachs

 

“Replicating complex, distributed systems across multiple cloud vendors is a challenging and costly proposition, even for the largest and most IT savvy of companies […] Cost and complexity aside, any ‘cloud agnostic’ strategy comes with a perilous downside: In an attempt to remove all reliance on anything that isn’t a commodity, companies end up purchasing the least innovative, least well-leveraged cloud services.” Tim Wagner, CEO at Vendia and fmr. Microsoft and AWS Tech Lead

 

“Multi-cloud doesn’t necessarily mean cloud agnostic,” Carter Page, Head of Data Engineering at Two Sigma