Executive Summary: ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Solutions - Global 2024
The individual quadrant reports are available at:
ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Solutions - Cloud-native Observability Solutions - Global 2024
ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Solutions - Cloud-native Security Platforms - Global 2024
ISG Provider Lens™ Multi Public Cloud Solutions - Multicloud FinOps Platforms - Global 2024
Vendors are infusing AI technologies to offer innovative solutions enabling users to improve their efficiencies
The rapid evolution of cloud infrastructure marks a significant shift in how organizations approach their digital transformation initiatives. The demand for cloud technologies has surged as businesses strive to combine the security and control of on-premises infrastructure with the scalability, innovation and flexibility offered by cloud platforms. The shift is catalyzed by fast-paced technological innovation and driven by strategic business demands requiring heightened operational agility and efficiency. Over the last few years, the urgent need to meet evolving strategic goals has driven the rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies within multicloud environments. It is revolutionizing how organizations design, deploy and manage their applications.
This transformation is driven by the desire to achieve unparalleled operational elasticity, growth efficiency and cost-effectiveness in today’s fast-paced and competitive landscape. Key open-source technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker are central to this transformation, which facilitates the adoption of microservice architectures through lightweight, portable containers. This containerized application development approach offers organizations exceptional
customization to manage their workload better and significantly augment their overall performance, thereby allowing
them to significantly accelerate their development process.
The above analysis is strongly echoed by an ISG survey in 2024 carried out across 310 organizations headquartered in diverse geographies to comprehend the current and future state of cloud adoption.
In today’s era of modern application development, the rapid rise in the adoption of open-source technologies is greatly reshaping the multicloud infrastructure landscape. This transformative shift is a technical evolution and a strategic revolution, redefining how applications are built, deployed and managed.
Open-source solutions are driving this change by fostering unprecedented levels of collaboration, innovation and transparency. The hypothesis is supported by a recent World of Open Source: Global Spotlight 2023 (Europe) survey carried out by the Linux Foundation across 197 organizations in an attempt to decipher how organizations can
benefit from open-source tools depending upon their usage as given below:
As per the below visualization, the benefits of open-source technologies embedded within cloud-native architectures extend beyond technical improvements. These tools enable organizations to innovate more quickly with reduced costs. They also empower them to harness the capabilities to tap into the diverse ecosystem of tools and integrations by allowing them to avoid vendor lock-ins and scale their applications without being confined to a single vendor’s ecosystem. This enhances operational efficiency and gives businesses a competitive edge in the market.
Besides significantly improving business continuity, cloud-native architectures offer a critical competitive edge by facilitating swift adaptation to changing internal and external market dynamics. The ability to dynamically scale resources and deploy updates seamlessly with lower downtimes empowers businesses to significantly accelerate their development process and achieve a better time to market. In an environment where expectations for seamless, feature-rich integrations are everincreasing, this agility is beneficial and essential for maintaining a competitive edge.
Upon analyzing the cloud-native ecosystem through the lens of strategic business objectives, it is important to mention that the rapid rise of open-source tools has catalyzed significant innovation. However, this shift has also introduced several complexities. The extensive use of these tools can expose organizations to heightened security risks and vulnerabilities with their code repositories being easily accessible to cybercriminals. Moreover, from a financial standpoint, cost management becomes complex as the use of open-source tools can lead to unpredictable
expenses. Performance monitoring also becomes challenging, given the diverse nature of open-source components integrated into cloud environments. Without effectively managing these aspects, organizations risk losing control over their cloud spending and the security and reliability of applications. Consequently, the increased adoption demands a strategic investment in cloud security, FinOps and observability solutions to unlock their full potential.
Security solutions provide essential guardrails on the cloud, protecting against vulnerabilities and ensuring that applications remain secure despite inherent risks. FinOps platforms enable organizations to gain visibility into their cloud spending, optimize resource utilization and make informed decisions pertaining to their workloads running on the cloud. As costs grow, FinOps practices will likely become critical for organizations to innovate cost-effectively and avoid unexpected expenses that can affect profitability. Furthermore, maintaining operational stability in complex multicloud environments requires a high level of system monitoring. Observability platforms empower organizations to monitor performance, provide real-time insights, detect anomalies and troubleshoot issues seamlessly across complex distributed operational environments.
While security vendors using the cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) are consciously working toward enhancing their portfolios with features such as advanced threat detection and automated policy enforcements,
observability vendors focus on elevating their metric, events, logs and traces (MELT) analysis capabilities. They leverage advanced AI suites to support deeper integrations with container ecosystems and distributed storage and perform elevated root cause analysis (RCA) by providing a detailed contextual behavioral analysis of the intertwined services and applications. These efforts empower organizations to seamlessly monitor and manage their highly dynamic infrastructure.
FinOps platforms focus on bridging the gaps between cloud stakeholders and providing visibility and insights necessary for all parties to make proactive cloud spend decisions. The FinOps philosophy mainly optimizes cloud
resources and reduces wasteful spending. By adopting a FinOps approach, enterprises can gain better visibility into their cloud usage, identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to reduce unnecessary costs. This
ultimately helps maximize the value derived from cloud investments while ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently. It also helps simplify complex problems throughout the cloud migration lifecycle, provides real-time modeling resources and rate optimizations, suggests workload landing zones where they can be most efficient, and recommends managed services and serverless technologies in a lift-and-shift migration.
As organizations increasingly adopt cloud technologies, they will require advanced tools to monitor and manage their complex cloud environments effectively. Cloud-native observability platforms will be essential for gaining visibility into cloud applications and infrastructure, enabling organizations to proactively identify and address potential issues. Additionally, the rise of cloud-native security platforms will be crucial to protect sensitive data and mitigate risks in cloud environments. As cloud usage grows, organizations must optimise their spending to ensure cost efficiency. FinOps platforms will play a vital role in helping businesses gain visibility into their cloud costs, identify areas for optimization and implement strategies to reduce unnecessary expenses. Therefore, the rising adoption of cloud technologies will drive a corresponding increase in demand for cloud-native observability, security and FinOps solutions.
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