Flexera is committed to supporting the success of multi-cloud enterprises. As part of that, we are pleased to announce an expansion of our partnership with Oracle that will extend Optima’s public cloud support to include management of Oracle Cloud. Our 2019 State of the Cloud Report makes it clear: As public cloud adoption and enterprise cloud spend grow, the use of multiple clouds is an intentional strategy for an increasing number of large organizations. Fully 84% of enterprises are already multi-cloud according to this year’s report, and that number is up 3% from last year.
What are the advantages driving this choice? One factor is flexibility. Choosing not to be limited to a single cloud provider’s offering allows enterprises to select from a much broader portfolio of cloud resources. It becomes easier to find the best geographic match, the right platform service for a given data, security, or compliance need, or the most resource-efficient solution for each application to optimize costs. A multi-cloud strategy can also increase resilience. Companies can create architectures to leverage clouds across multiple vendors so that an outage with a single vendor will not bring down key applications.
Sometimes, the use of multiple cloud vendors can result from external factors in the business. Cloud portfolios inevitably expand through acquisitions, temporary projects and experiments, or shadow usage. This sprawl may be inevitable, but a conscious, controlled, multi-cloud approach helps keep it under control through cross-cloud visibility, constant re-assessment and optimization of workloads, and stakeholder communication and accountability.
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Finally, a multi-cloud approach also helps buffer companies against a changing market, enabling them to easily add or change cloud providers in the future. It gives enterprises leverage with vendors, helping them negotiate the best possible financial terms among providers competing for their business.
The power of being able to choose among various cloud providers is more important today than ever before. The reason is that the cloud vendor landscape continues to evolve rapidly. While the AWS/Azure competition typically gets the most attention – followed by Google Cloud – it’s important to note the rise of other public clouds. For example, as shown in our 2018 and 2019 State of the Cloud surveys, Oracle Cloud had the greatest percentage growth in the number of respondents using the cloud over the last 2 years, doubling in 2018 and increasing 60% in 2019.
It’s no surprise then that forward-thinking enterprises favor multi-cloud, and Flexera is committed to providing an evolving toolset to support this need. Central to our vision is continuing to expand support for the cloud providers our customers use in Optima, our cloud cost management and visibility solution. Those who use Oracle Cloud should be pleased to learn that, as part of realizing that vision, we’re proud to expand Optima’s public cloud support to include Oracle Cloud. And we will continue to embrace the fast-moving multi-cloud landscape as it continues to evolve.
