Are Your Peers Outperforming You with a Better Cloud Strategy?

Multicloud is here to stay. Whether your organization has launched a strategy that deploys multiple clouds or is just considering it, one thing is clear: the options are complex and almost endless. And not all multicloud strategies are equal. 

Most organizations now operate cloud environments composed of multiple services that must integrate, move dataflows between them, and operate as a single, seamless, frictionless ecosystem. At the same time, most organizations are generating, collecting, and using larger data flows than ever before.

Consider a few recent data points and projections: 

• 82% of organizations use two or more public cloud infrastructure service providers 
• 30% use four or more providers (expected to reach 63% in two years) 
• 53% of organizations currently manage 100+ intercloud integrations 
• Unstructured data under management is growing at a 39.4% compound annual growth rate  
• Enterprise data is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 42% 
• The global datasphere is expected to double from 2022 to2026

Despite the growing adoption of multicloud environments and the data that flows through them, most organizations are struggling to achieve mature multicloud strategies and capture the benefits it can provide.

To better understand the state of multicloud and how organizations can improve theirs, we partnered with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) on a custom research project—The Multicloud Maturity Report. The report found that only 13% of organizations have achieved multicloud maturity. While this statistic sounds dire, it’s actually good news for your organization. 

Most of your peers and competitors likely have a low multicloud maturity level. This represents a clear avenue for a competitive advantage that you can exploit by improving your organization’s own maturity levels.

In this article, we will examine the report’s data to show how to capture this opportunity. To do so, we’ll explore: 

• Why it’s worth improving your multicloud maturity as much as possible 
• The concrete steps you can take to meaningfully improve your current cloud maturity levels  
• How to pick the right tools to bring your new cloud strategies to life ASAP

Big Benefits: Why It’s Worth Achieving Multicloud Maturity

As reported in The Multicloud Maturity Report, ESG’s analysis quantified the value of achieving multicloud maturity and mapped the benefits that mature organizations enjoy. They found that organizations that achieved a high degree of maturity vastly outperformed their peers across a wide range of business value drivers. Multicloud mature organizations:

• Beat revenue goals by almost two times their peers 
• Are 5.3 times more likely to beat their revenue goals by 10% or more 
• Are 6.3 times more likely to go to market months or quarters ahead of peers 
•  Are 57% faster than their peers at growing data-related revenue 
• Launched 2.6 times more products via data-driven innovation 
• Are 2.8 times more likely to strengthen their competitive position and 2.2 times more likely to grow their customer-wallet share 
• Reduced their cloud storage costs by 36% or more 
• Feel more confident about their cloud strategy and spending as a whole

In short, it’s worth doing whatever it takes to achieve the highest multicloud maturity levels possible...and ESG’s research shows you how to do that. They went beyond simply analyzing maturity levels of different organizations and used their findings to map key areas to focus on—and the key steps to take—that can help improve your organization’s cloud maturity level. 

How to Achieve Multicloud Maturity: What to Focus On

ESG’s survey determined which organizations had mature multicloud strategies and reaped the benefits—and which organizations were lagging and struggling with a mess of data and deployments.

ESG evaluated organizations according to two top-level criteria: 

1. Ability to Minimize Data-Related Costs: The survey found that 73% of organizations were hampered by data-retention costs, and Seagate’s Rethink Data report found that organizations used only 32% of data available. By contrast, mature organizations found cost-effective ways to collect and retain as much of their data as possible, opening more opportunities for insights.  
2. Ability to Scale Innovation: Mature organizations did more than just collect mass amounts of data...they also made their data highly accessible. In mature organizations, end users could quickly and easily access data they needed through simple, built-in mechanisms within the data architecture. This allowed end users to rapidly turn data into insights that drive innovation. 

ESG combined the scores for these two criteria to create their macro multicloud maturity score. To raise your organization’s multicloud maturity score—and reap the benefits a mature strategy provides—you need to minimize data-related costs and improve how you scale innovation.

The report also outlines several actions successful companies have executed and that your organization can learn from. 

How Successful Companies Minimize Data-Related Costs

ESG found that only 18% of organizations are leaders at minimizing their data-related costs. Additionally, 52% of organizations are moderately mature, while 30% are rated least mature.

According to ESG, leaders who minimize data-related costs take the following steps: 

• Use a predictive third-party cloud cost tool. Successful companies measure the costs of cloud resources for every data deployment and placement decision. Cloud maturity leaders were 12 times more likely to do this.  
• Perform extensive due-diligence activities. Before deploying an application, leading organizations make sure it can deliver the user experience needed. Leaders evaluated 2 times more application characteristics than less successful counterparts (like performance, availability, and data mobility).  
• Monitor multiple characteristics. After selecting and deploying an application, successful companies continue to monitor it. Leaders monitored twice as many application characteristics compared to other companies. Notably, these top organizations tend to focus on an application’s network capabilities.  
• Invest in the right tools and training. Leaders invested in automation and visibility tools along with storage platforms that work across cloud environments. They also offered training to ensure their people could navigate multicloud systems.  
• Automate security and protection. Successful organizations accelerate operations and reduce the burden on their staff through automation. Leaders automated twice as many functions—from data monitoring to managing access rights—as did others.

By following these steps, leaders that minimized data-related costs generated many benefits their peers did not and took a big step toward achieving a higher macro multicloud maturity score. Yet, minimizing costs is only half the battle.

How Leading Organizations Improve the Ability to Scale Innovation

ESG found that only 14% of organizations are leaders at scaling data-related innovation. Organizations that are moderately mature made up 59% of the group while 27% are least mature.

According to ESG, leaders in scaling data-related innovations follow these steps, which may offer a blueprint for your own organization: 

• Streamline access to data. Leaders are 4.2 times more likely to be very strong at providing data access than others. It’s vital that end users have access to their data at least 80% of the time, and that you collaborate with them to continuously improve access.  
• Use tools to move data seamlessly. By investing in technology needed to easily move data to the right place at the right time, leaders are 2.6 times more likely to be very strong at moving data than other companies.  
• Make data access self-service. Leaders remove bottlenecks to data access. They let end users see, access and use the data they need, whenever they need it. Leaders offer 2.1 times as many end users with self-service data access than others.  
• Invest in training and collaboration. To help end users accept and use data, successful companies train them early and often, and make these sessions cross-functional. Leaders are 16.7 times more likely to offer quarterly or more frequent training. 
• Measure net-promoter scores (NPS) of data end users. Leaders measure a 9 times greater NPS of data end users than others. They measure the NPS of each data end user group and follow up with groups that report low scores to improve data access.

Organizations that follow these steps—and the steps to improve, minimize their data-related costs—achieve multicloud maturity and outpace their peers. 

Yet even though these steps are clear—and some of them even seem obvious—many organizations struggle to follow them. For the rest of this piece, we’ll explore why that is, and how you can overcome these common barriers and bring a more mature multicloud strategy to life at your organization.

Picking the Right Tools to Drive Your Mature Multicloud Strategy

To bring a more mature multicloud strategy to life, you need:

1. Mass data storage: You must be able to store as much organizational data as possible in a cost-effective manner.  
2. Multicloud freedom: You need to make data freely accessible across a multicloud infrastructure. 

Unfortunately, many organizations lack the right tools to deliver these capabilities.

• Their data storage tools and services are too expensive. As noted above, The Multicloud Maturity Report found that 84% of organizations believe they can create more business value if they better leverage their existing data, but 73% are hampered by the cost of retaining their data, and ~3/5ths of organizations deleted valuable data over the past year because of high storage costs.  
• Their tools and services place collected data in silos. These costs also create less flexible and accessible data. Moving and accessing data can become too expensive when tools and services charge for API and egress fees. These added, unpredictable costs prevent organizations from moving and accessing data freely, stifling flexibility and innovation.

New data tools and services are entering the market that correct these problems, and make it simpler, easier, and more cost-effective to implement a mature multicloud strategy. And at Seagate, we’ve developed two such tools.

Lyve™ Mobile is an edge storage device that lets you retain, store, and transfer every bit of collected data in a cost-effective manner. Lyve Mobile was built to store and transfer large-scale data flows from modern, distributed devices. Most importantly, Lyve Mobile offers an on-demand consumption model in which data transfers are delivered as a service where you only pay for the devices you need, when you need them.

The result: You reduce your CapEx and OpEx, and gain the ability to store all the data your organization generates without large, unpredictable costs.

Lyve Cloud is a simple, trusted, and efficient object storage solution for mass data designed to create flexibility, easy access, and rapid innovation within multicloud environments. Lyve Cloud eliminates API charges and egress fees, thus reducing friction between cloud services. With Lyve Cloud, you can share data seamlessly with other cloud environments, access your data anytime at any scale, and enjoy stable, predictable capacity-based pricing. 

The result: Lower your total cost of operation (TCO) by more than 70% and remove barriers to freely move and access your data, driving more insights and greater innovation.

Together, Lyve Mobile and Lyve Cloud provide the multicloud freedom and cost controls needed to reach greater multicloud maturity—quickly and easily.

Take the Next Step: Improve Your Multicloud Maturity Today

Only 13% of organizations have achieved true multicloud maturity across both costs and innovation. No matter how effectively you’ve designed and deployed your cloud strategy, it’s likely there are few areas where you could improve capabilities, increase maturity, and deliver even great benefits for your organization.

To start, review the steps listed above, and see if you missed any in your current multicloud strategy implementation.

Then, review your tools to see if they’re delivering the mass data storage and multicloud freedom required to get the most from your strategy. If they aren’t, please reach out to learn more about Seagate’s Lyve Cloud and Lyve Mobile solutions and how they can help you bring your organization’s multicloud maturity to the next level.