The CIO Roadmap to Hybrid and Multi-Cloud: A comprehensive guide to maturing the cloud journey and accelerating business value across the enterprise

WHITE PAPER–JUNE 2021 The CIO Roadmap to Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Last century, the average lifespan for a company was more than 50 years. Today most S&P 500 companies survive just over 20 years, with predictions that the lifespan will shrink to 1 just 12 years by 2027. From SaaS to PaaS, on-premises to the public cloud, containers to Kubernetes, we’re living in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. With a realistic roadmap that ties IT strategy to business outcomes, and identifies the people, processes, and technologies required at each stage of the hybrid cloud journey. CIOs who have begun their cloud journeys can confidently assess what they have achieved and move toward a more seamless multi-cloud operating model based on the business goals they are trying to accomplish. Executive Summary The impact of the cloud on both the business and IT is undeniable. As part of a broader enterprise digital strategy that embraces data center and application modernization, the cloud has become a key driver of business expansion and operational efficiency. It enables the agile development of new products and services allowing companies to build competitive differentiation. Yet business and IT leaders who have made moves to embrace the cloud may feel stuck, and struggle to understand how to truly transform their organizations into fully cloud-driven and cloud-optimized enterprises. In this paper, we present a CIO roadmap to hybrid and multi-cloud, giving CIOs a benchmark they can use to measure their cloud aspirations against organizational realities. This roadmap offers a personalized, actionable approach to hybrid cloud adoption that supports current and future-facing business and IT objectives. The Market Opportunity Today’s CIO is an architect of new business models, leveraging technology to break into new markets, improve the customer experience, drive down costs, and create new sources of revenue. This evolution is happening within a reality in which any industry or company can be disrupted by an innovative startup or competitor using applications to provide superior customer experience at scale. The cloud is becoming the standard approach to building and delivering applications for the modern enterprise. This is bolstered by the recognition of the value of applications to the business. Another critical factor is the need to match each application to the environment that provides the best resources and support. Increasingly, those environments are located outside of capital-intensive, on-premises data centers. Economies of scale give public cloud providers the advantage by amortizing across a broad customer base many of the financial pressures of running a data center—such as maintenance, upkeep, power, cooling, and staffing costs—across a broad customer base. These savings can be passed on to the enterprise, providing a more cost-effective supply of storage, compute, and connectivity for applications. Migrating to a public cloud also allows organizations to take advantage of flexible pricing models, paying only for the computing resources being used by the applications active in the cloud at any given time. Perhaps most important in the era of competitive disruption and differentiation, public cloud gives enterprises access to an expansive new world of development, deployment, management, and data services that recast the role of CIO into that of trusted advisor and innovator to the business. 1. Innosight, Corporate Longevity Forecast Creative Destruction is Accelerating, 2018. WHITE PAPER | 2 The CIO Roadmap to Hybrid