How a Multi-Cloud

Strategy Enables Digital

Transformation

Maliha Balala

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

How a Multi-Cloud Strategy Enables Digital Transformation
by Maliha Balala
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 Table of Contents

How a Multi-Cloud Strategy Enables Digital Transformation. . . . . . . . . . 1

Defining Digital Transformation 1
Digital Transformation in Practice 1
Using a Multi-Cloud Strategy to Achieve Digital
Transformation 2

iii
 How a Multi-Cloud Strategy
Enables Digital Transformation

When news broke that Amazon was acquiring Whole Foods, brick
and mortar retailers panicked. Many industries are feeling pressure
to undergo digital transformation for fear of being “Amazoned”
(acquired by an online competitor). The International Data Corpo‐
ration (IDC) forecasts worldwide spending on digital transforma‐
tion technologies will grow to more than $1.2 trillion in 2017 (an
increase of 17.8% over 2016). IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Digital
Transformation Spending Guide reports that many industries have
been affected by the frenzy, too, with manufacturing leading the
pack, followed by retail, health care, insurance, and banking. No one
wants to be “disrupted.”

Defining Digital Transformation

Surprisingly, despite the anxiety around digital transformation and
the money being invested, the term is not well defined. George
Westerman, principal research scientist with the MIT Sloan Initia‐
tive on the Digital Economy, defines digital transformation as “using
technology to radically improve the performance and reach of an
organization.” Technology, however, is accelerating at such a fast
pace that it makes it difficult for businesses to keep up and stay
ahead of the curve.

Digital Transformation in Practice

How do businesses unlock the power of rapidly evolving technology
to maximize their investment? One answer, according to the 2017

1
Digital IQ survey, which looked at top performing IT and business
leaders across industries is to focus less on one specific technology
and more on the human experience. Focusing on the human experi‐
ence means organizations will have to re-examine their customers’
experiences, employees’ experiences, and their entire organizational
culture. In developing a better understanding of the human experi‐
ence that surrounds digital technology, companies are better equip‐
ped to continuously adapt and anticipate marketplace changes.

Using a Multi-Cloud Strategy to Achieve

Digital Transformation
A growing number of companies have embraced a multi-cloud
approach as part of their digital transformation strategy, mainly to
meet various business and technology requirements because no sin‐
gle cloud model can fit the diverse requirements and workloads
across different business units.
Every major cloud platform—including Amazon Web Services,
Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform—has a range of
data-related services in the areas of cloud data warehousing, big
data, NoSQL, and real-time streaming, to name a few. Some work‐
loads run better on one cloud platform while other workloads ach‐
ieve higher performance and lower cost on another platform. By
adopting a multi-cloud strategy, companies are able to choose best-
in-class technologies and services from different cloud providers to
create the best possible solution for a business.
Another reason for a multi-cloud approach is that companies adopt
new IT projects in increments. A multi-cloud environment creates
an ideal sandbox for IT to experiment with and deploy proof-of-
concepts. Various teams can set up and decommission scenarios
quickly without the burden of the high cost and time needed to
build and deploy new infrastructure.
With a multi-cloud strategy, each business unit can choose their
ideal cloud service depending on their specific business needs,
which may include:

• Ease of administration
• Concurrency of workloads
• Query performance
• User roles and access levels

2 | How a Multi-Cloud Strategy Enables Digital Transformation

 • Security and governance
• Government regulations and data privacy
• Specialized functionality for a particular workload or applica‐
tion (i.e., machine learning or AI)
• Access to big data tools and technologies
As businesses go through their digital transformation journey,
multi-cloud environments will be increasingly used to transition
and migrate from the old model of customer engagement to newer
multi-pronged models. The trend is moving toward deeper and
broader cloud engagement, so a well-defined multi-cloud strategy
will be key to achieving maximum return on investment (ROI).
Other benefits of adopting a multi-cloud strategy include:
Price flexibility
Better pricing flexibility by leveraging different cloud platforms.
Risk mitigation or redundancy
By spreading workloads and data across multiple cloud plat‐
forms, companies can reduce downtime and have a smoother
disaster recovery plan.
Unlimited scalability and better agility
Elasticity and agility to empower business units as they grow,
and meet the demands to access more data.
Avoid vendor lock-in
The option to adapt to changes in the marketplace without
reworking the whole cloud architecture to suit one vendor.
Adopt use of best practices
Best practices built on one cloud vendor can be applied across
the enterprise to departments using other cloud vendors.
As more companies strategically position themselves in a multi-
cloud world, IT departments in general, and CIOs in particular,
need to take on more strategic roles as facilitators between various
areas of the business. This trend reflects the key point that digital
transformation is not a one-time phenomenon, but an ongoing pro‐
cess. Even as companies realize the impacts of social media, mobile
and cloud computing, and other “disruptive” technologies already
on the rise (including machine learning, data collection via drones,
and virtual reality), data remains a central tenet to their success.
With the amount of data growing exponentially, a multi-cloud strat‐

Using a Multi-Cloud Strategy to Achieve Digital Transformation | 3

egy is becoming a deliberate choice for companies and a way to
chart their long-term growth. Companies that seek to remain ahead
of the curve will be in a better position to respond and continually
transform themselves in a quickly evolving digital landscape.
This report is a collaboration between Talend and O’Reilly. See our
statement of editorial independence.

4 | How a Multi-Cloud Strategy Enables Digital Transformation

About the Author
Maliha Balala currently leads the technical communications team at
WhirlWind Technologies. She is a polymath who enjoys researching
and talking about technology, education, psychology, literature, and
philosophy.
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