Cloud-centric architecture refers to an approach to building IT infrastructure (e.g. data centres) where public, private and hybrid cloud becomes the core of the architecture. This is driven by a need for flexibility, pay as you go and scalability to meet digital and data driven business needs.
The face of modern day computing has dramatically changed since the advent of the cloud and cloud computing. There has been an increasingly bigger push to move everything to the cloud especially in recent years. The cloud has become a critical business tool and moving to a cloud-centric architecture enables organisations to gain advantage over their competitors with improved agility, efficiency and optimised business value.
Cloud-centric architectures have brought an entirely new approach to solving problems, allowing businesses to take solutions to market at an accelerated pace – and at cloud scale – at a much lower cost. Startups and born-in-the-cloud businesses were the early adopters of cloud-native development, but now the movement to cloud-centric architectures is gaining popularity in the enterprise space as well.
One of the biggest challenges for any company embarking on a cloud transformation journey is determining the right cloud path for their business. Depending on their business and IT requirements, there are three primary types of cloud implementations available to organisations today: public, private and hybrid – each with its own its own advantages as well as limitations.
According to a recent study commissioned by Barracuda Networks, today’s organizations, on average, have nearly 40 percent of their infrastructure in the public cloud and this number is expected to increase to 70 percent over the next five years. Four in ten respondents reported that their organization relied on public cloud deployments to expand their services, often replicating those over multiple regions, while 30 percent said they only migrated selected services to the cloud and kept the balance on premises. Overall, the survey found that organizations are growing more comfortable with hybrid environments that deploy a range of public cloud services along with more traditional on-premises infrastructure.
So like it or not, the cloud is here to stay. Embracing the cloud and adopting a cloud-centric infrastructure is among the essential components that can help an organisation take the right step towards digitisation and easily scale as their business grows.
