Multi-cloud is becoming the digital backbone for Nordic businesses and societies

The pandemic has not affected the cloud ambitions of the organizations. On the contrary, cloud has stayed high on their agenda: 50% of the Nordic organizations indicated that cloud projects are re-evaluated and reshaped but not halted in general due to the Covid-19 situation. 

Application modernization and transformation justifies the interest in private cloud

Furthermore, a growing interest in private cloud solutions points specifically towards edge computing and innovation readiness with more than 60% of organizations having more than 25% of workloads in private cloud. The trend becomes more evident if we look at enterprise application development.

According to IDC Research, custom-built applications and industry specific applications are expected to be the bulk part of the more than 520 million applications developed and deployed globally between 2019 and 2025 (compared to about 100 million applications in the 40 years before 2019). This will be the gem of the next steps in the digital transformation, as business and technology merge into digital.

”Application modernization is boosting the development of multi-cloud, as different enterprise applications have different needs and requirements, like security and performance, resulting into multiple differentiated clouds. The multi-cloud environment is enabling organizations to manage data on their own and treat digital services and compute power as the infrastructure that is needed to release the value from any organization’s data. This is natural evolution in cloud maturity”, Torstensson continues.

Automation taking over cloud environments

The IDC cloud survey forecasts significant automation development in the next 24 months. Almost one in four (23%) organizations will have automated the orchestration of cloud solutions. This number is likely to be even higher, as nearly one-third (29%) of organizations will leave the orchestration to third-party vendors. There is no doubt that these vendors will use automation to manage their customers’ multi-cloud environments.

It is important to recognize that internal orchestration in IT organizations is growing. IDC believes this shows a strengthening of the IT-organizations role as trusted enablers when it comes to handling the digital infrastructure by taking care of cloud orchestration.

Demand for secure and sustainable solutions increasing

41% of Nordic organizations consider security issues to be the biggest challenge when executing cloud transformation. A slightly higher number of respondents - 42% - consider compliance risk to be the biggest challenge. 

“There is an ongoing discussion on data residency in all four Nordic countries, although it is most visible in Sweden and Norway. Recent high-profile data breaches have hit the news in Finland, causing a heightened concern about cybersecurity and data protection also among Finnish citizens. Managing data and digital risk is an essential part of the trust needed for multi-cloud", Johan Torstensson says. 

Another element in the trust discussion is sustainability. Among the Finnish and Swedish respondents 42 % were taking the environmental impact such as energy consumption or CO2 emission into account when implementing their cloud strategy. However, only 36 % of Norwegian respondents answered yes to the same question.

 “The request from customers in cloud is about energy consumption, as well as the lifecycle management of hardware etc. If you do not take that seriously, you will not be invited to take part to the conversation – at all. Sustainability has become a given – like security,” he concludes.

IDC also predicts that the changes created by the Covid-19 crisis will help to pave the way for more sustainable and climate-friendly development.