The Rise of AI and Its Impact on Cloud Adoption
The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are significantly influencing the way organizations approach cloud technology. As AI becomes more integrated into business operations, the demand for cloud infrastructure is expected to soar. However, successfully leveraging AI goes beyond simply increasing computing capabilities. It requires a fundamental transformation in how cloud infrastructures are deployed, managed, and governed. This modernization effort is crucial for organizations looking to enhance their AI capabilities without causing disruptions that could hinder team performance and stifle innovation.
Predictions for Cloud Adoption by 2027
According to Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, it is anticipated that by 2027, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid cloud models. This shift is largely driven by the need to accommodate AI’s explosive growth, which adds a layer of complexity to an already intricate operating environment. Hybrid cloud models combine public and private cloud resources, offering flexibility and scalability that are essential for AI applications.
Managing Hybrid Cloud: Strategies for Success
The early days of cloud computing were marked by the excitement of on-demand resources and limitless scalability, which encouraged swift application deployment. However, this rapid expansion often resulted in a fragmented ecosystem characterized by disparate tools, inconsistent processes, and heightened security risks. Different teams within the same organization frequently used varying toolsets and procedures, leading to security policies being interpreted and applied in unique ways.
This complexity has several drawbacks:
- Tool proliferation, or "tool sprawl," is almost inevitable, leading to common misconfigurations that create potential vulnerabilities.
- Protecting sensitive information, or "secrets," becomes more challenging. Account compromises are a leading cause of data breaches.
- Achieving a return on investment (ROI) from cloud adoption remains elusive for many business leaders.
Addressing Cloud Adoption Challenges
Gartner’s research highlights that by 2028, 25% of organizations will be significantly dissatisfied with their cloud adoption due to unrealistic expectations, suboptimal implementations, or uncontrolled costs. Furthermore, over half of organizations will not achieve the desired outcomes from their multi-cloud strategies by 2029. To overcome these challenges, organizations need fewer tools and more consistent processes to scale hybrid cloud infrastructures efficiently and securely.
The Role of Platform Teams in Cloud Maturity
For organizations to advance in cloud maturity, it is essential for leaders to foster collaboration between infrastructure, security, and development teams. Those excelling in this area are utilizing platform engineering teams equipped with the right tools and standardized workflows. These teams play a pivotal role in managing infrastructure, implementing safeguards, and enabling AI use cases to thrive.
Platform teams differ from traditional internal teams as they create fully developed products rather than just tools. These teams are centralized groups responsible for building and maintaining an internal developer platform that is accessible to development teams across the organization. Their objectives include delivering standardized infrastructure across any cloud or hybrid estate, providing reusable services, and ensuring consistent workflows.
The Benefits of Platform Teams
By 2026, it is projected that 80% of large software organizations will implement platform teams, marking a 35% increase over four years. Platform teams act as a bridge between developers and security teams. Developers seek faster, self-service access to infrastructure, while security teams prioritize consistency and control. Platform engineers reconcile these needs by delivering products that meet both requirements.
For platform teams to succeed, unified infrastructure and security lifecycle management are crucial. HashiCorp’s Infrastructure Cloud offers such a solution, providing a unified control plane for delivering hybrid cloud infrastructure. This approach replaces fragmented environments and disparate tools with a suite of hybrid-cloud-supporting products. These products integrate various environments—public cloud, private cloud, legacy systems, and on-premises—using a single interface and standardized workflows.
Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Deployment
The Infrastructure Cloud simplifies the deployment process by creating an abstraction layer that reduces complexity. This abstraction allows different environment administrators to incorporate specific processes and safeguards without needing to understand the intricacies of each supported environment. The platform’s abstraction layer manages these complexities.
For developers, this streamlined approach makes their work easier. They can provision resources through HashiCorp Terraform, a component of the Infrastructure Cloud, regardless of whether they are deploying to a mainframe or a cloud provider. Developers can choose from a menu of tested and verified modules or products tailored to their use case. Image management is facilitated through HCP Packer, while secrets and session authentication are handled by default through Vault and Boundary, irrespective of the environment.
Empowering Organizations with The Infrastructure Cloud
By empowering platform teams with The Infrastructure Cloud, organizations can standardize infrastructure and security lifecycle management, enhance visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and accelerate software delivery while strengthening security and compliance. This enables organizations to scale hybrid cloud environments rapidly, automating many lower-level tasks through standardized workflows as demand for computing resources increases. Consequently, teams will operate in optimized hybrid cloud environments that are both scalable and capable of realizing the full ROI of their cloud transformation.
Conclusion
The convergence of AI and cloud technology represents a significant shift in how organizations operate. By adopting hybrid cloud models and leveraging platform teams, organizations can navigate the complexities of cloud adoption while maximizing the potential of AI. HashiCorp’s Infrastructure Cloud provides the necessary tools and framework to achieve this transformation, ensuring that businesses remain competitive in an increasingly digital world.
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