Cloud trends change with the introduction of new technology and evolving business requirements. Traditional on-premises data center infrastructure has been supplemented with private and public cloud options, resulting in hybrid cloud strategies. Hybrid cloud strategies have their challenges, which IT departments may not have anticipated completely, such as the disconnects between private cloud and public cloud. Although hybrid cloud solutions have emerged to help address the issue, the next cloud trend is distributed cloud.
Gartner defines distributed cloud as “the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while the operation, governance, updates and evolution of the services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider.” In fact, Gartner identified distributed cloud as a top 10 trend for 2020.
Cloud providers have maintained data centers in various locations around the world, although regions and zones haven’t always met the performance requirements of all uses cases or all data residency requirements. Cloud providers have been expanding their footprints to keep up evolving customer requirements, including providing distributed cloud options.
Distributed cloud includes what Gartner calls “substations”, which may be shared by more than one company. As Gartner describes it, “Distributed cloud creates strategically placed substations of cloud compute, storage and networking that can act as shared cloud pseudo-availability zones.” The substations bring cloud access physically closer to the customer than zones do.
These early transitions to a cloudified edge and true multi-cloud are separate trends, but they are both part of a larger evolution toward the distributed cloud. The distributed cloud is an all new approach that will enable organizations to manage all disparate components – edge apps, apps stretched across multiple clouds, legacy datacenter apps, and the infrastructure that supports them all – as one logical cloud. This is the Holy Grail: being able to manage, operate and secure all these compute areas as a single, distributed cloud. That means deploying apps with a common set of policies and overarching visibility across all locations and heterogenous infrastructure.
The distributed cloud won’t happen overnight, and it really won’t start taking shape until 2022 and beyond. But these key trends illustrate that the first pieces are beginning to come together.