How Will Your Organization Harness the Power of Public Cloud for Digital Transformation?

Companies are making their way from legacy IT infrastructures into the cloud in record numbers, with 2018 shaping up to be the year when enterprises push hard to accelerate innovation cycles and maximize their cloud investments. To do so, many will seek a trusted advisor to help harness the overwhelming power of public cloud. The skyrocketing growth in public cloud adoption is undeniable. All four major public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud — released spectacular Q4 earnings results; Microsoft and Alibaba doubled their cloud businesses, AWS hit a $20 billion run rate, and Google announced $1 billion in quarterly revenue. That surge is mirrored in RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud report, which found that 92 percent of respondents are already in the public cloud, with more than a third of enterprises calling the public cloud their top priority. Another standout statistic: most respondents are using an average of five public cloud platforms. That multi-cloud complexity has increased the need for expertise across all the major public clouds, to help organizations understand which workloads should be deployed on which clouds, and how to integrate those systems to provide a singular governance system and view.

Digital transformation is a business imperative

The survey results reflect what we’re seeing here at Rackspace. Companies understand that to stay competitive, they must accelerate innovation and time to market. Digital transformation is now an imperative, and for most, that means expansion into public cloud. The public cloud provides a fantastic innovation platform for launching and running key workloads and applications that matter to companies in today’s digital economy, including big data and analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, you name it. But we also see organizations struggling, as the features and firepower of public cloud can be overwhelming. Each cloud has its own ever-widening portfolio of services — AWS released 1,400 new features in 2017 alone — plus each one offers different specializations. While public cloud adoption continues to accelerate, it’s not at all clear that most companies are using them to full effectiveness off the shelf. CIOs and other IT professionals report being overwhelmed by the pace and enormity of the task of managing increasingly complex ecosystems and transformation projects. Not surprisingly, given the size of their transformation efforts, enterprises cite more challenges than smaller companies. What’s more, central IT continues to evolve, focusing more on setting policy, managing costs and brokering cloud services, and less on managing their company’s cloud deployments.

Finding the right partner

Given that shift, it’s no wonder so many organizations seek out a trusted partner. Since we launched our Managed Public Clouds businesses in late 2015, more than a thousand customers have joined Rackspace to fully exploit the tremendous platform capabilities of the four hyper scale public cloud platforms to fuel and execute on their innovation agendas. We’re privileged to serve customers like Sesame Street, whose traditional IT infrastructure design was limiting its ability to grow with its international audience. https://youtu.be/3EH1BYZRIEQ

Check out the video above to see just one example of how we're enabling successful journeys to the cloud — and ultimately helping customers deliver on their missions.

Customer challenges we see mirror those from the RightScale survey, with security and cost control topping the list, followed by a lack of resources, governance, compliance and managing multiple clouds. The ability to solve these complex challenges is why Rackspace is recognized as an industry-leading managed services provider, chosen by more than half of Fortune 100 companies to enable their digital transformation. With extensive expertise across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and the Alibaba Cloud, Rackspace provides unbiased but highly opinionated guidance to help customers choose the best public clouds for their specific technical and business needs. Rackspace's end-to-end solutions provide 24x7x365 access to certified experts, tooling and automation, architectural guidance, deployment, advanced monitoring and proactive optimization. Our holistic approach to cloud adoption goes well beyond cloud infrastructure, providing assistance with cloud cost optimization, migration, advanced security services and specialized application and data management, helping customers to overcome the most common cloud adoption barriers and tap the power of the public cloud. To learn more about how we help guide digital transformation and enable cloud adoption, contact a Rackspace cloud specialist today.