Figures from Enso show that IT leaders want a distributed cloud due to cost and cut down on network problems and control issues.
IT leaders credited the lower risk of network failure because the distributed cloud enables cloud services to sit in local or semi-local subnets – able to operate untethered if necessary.
Enso’s survey found a growing interest in distributed cloud, with significant cloud providers already leading the way with solutions supporting the strategy, such as AWS Outposts, Google Anthos and Microsoft Azure Stack.
These allow a single plane of control to operate and manage public cloud infrastructure housed across a range of environments, including with the public cloud provider, on-premise or in another colocation space.
About 36 percent of respondents said this flexibility on location where cloud services can be hosted and consumed made distributed cloud an attractive cloud strategy.
Ensono’s research also found that 42 percent of respondents viewed the removal of latency as a significant benefit of the distributed cloud. Many industry analysts have pointed to the distributed cloud being “ideally suited” for the rise of cloud-native SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications, providing high-performance and near-zero latency computing to accelerate the deployment of SaaS apps across the enterprise and right to the ‘edge’. SaaS was a core part of the public cloud’s growth last year: IDC estimated 2020 SaaS revenue reached $148 billion, up 18.6 percent year on year.
Flexibility on data location has other benefits. GDPR and other similar regulations have seen governments worldwide start mandating that some data on its citizens needs to be stored within a specific jurisdiction.
Around a third of IT leaders surveyed by Ensono agreed that distributed cloud offered a powerful way to improve compliance with regulatory requirements on data location.
Ensono Public Cloud GM Sean Roberts said: “Distributed cloud provides us with a window into the future of the public cloud. By unmooring public cloud services from being tied to a fixed location, enterprises have the freedom to rethink the possibilities of cloud architecture, moving public cloud workloads to wherever they are needed in a business’ infrastructure.”
He said that this was a significant asset for compliance, enabling firms to keep up with shifts in regulation and easily adjust data location – backed by continuous control, monitoring and support from the public cloud provider.
“Over the next decade, distributed cloud will put the user at the centre of public cloud. We are already starting to see the emergence of low latency, high-performance form of computing centred around cloud services processed as close to the user as possible. Out of this will flow unbridled innovation in edge computing, accelerating advancements in everything from autonomous vehicles to industrial connected devices”, Roberts said.
