Innovation It’s Time To Re-Imagine The Multicloud Dave Mosley Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Aug 8, 2022, 08:15am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate Technology . getty Here’s an observation so true it’s trite: There’s a lot of data in the world. Depending on when you were born, you may recall thumbing through thousands of entries in a library card catalog. I’m nostalgic for that tactile experience—and the treasures that I discovered as a result. The organization of massive volumes of enterprise data doesn’t evoke the same feelings, but it is just as important. How to find the right data? How to uncover its insights? The efficient organization of unstructured data—a cataloging of it, if you will—is a key determinant of business value. Data tells us who we are, who we were and who we can become. It is the catalog of our highest highs and lowest lows. It allows us to look beyond the horizon. Many leaders realize that if they dismiss the lessons contained in data, they will lose out on value. Locked-In Data, Locked-In Value Increasingly, data’s path to value is filled with a plethora of impediments. One big reason for this is costs. They’re increasingly steep for data that moves and resides in the multicloud where most enterprise data lives. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event This was the case even before the current global inflation. My fellow Forbes Council Network member Adam Stern wrote in these pages in 2018 that more than half of IT leaders saw “managing costs to run cloud workloads” as a huge obstacle. Since then, things have only gotten worse. The costs—egress fees associated with data migration, application programming interface (API) fees and the like—have only become stiffer and more unpredictable. Business leaders report that the multicloud data bills are inscrutable and, often, literally thick. Wrangling cloud costs has become a job that people do. Ask a cloud economist. As CEO of Seagate Technology, I think about these issues a lot. That is why I’m curious about data. Specifically, the question on the minds of business leaders: How can we get more out of our data while keeping costs low ? Before tackling this question, let’s orient ourselves with a bit more context. In addition to rising data expenses, the growing multicloud complexity also includes structural impediments. The increasingly enormous datasets sprawl and become weighed down by what Dave McCrory called data gravity . The more the massive datasets spread from endpoints to core, the more distributed the data landscape. Data gravity—the reality that the more massive the datasets, the more they will attract services, other data and applications—inevitably produces bottlenecks from endpoints to core. Many companies entrust their data to up to several service providers. The number of intercloud integrations managed by an average company with at least 1PB of data under management is over 100. Poor communication among the clouds means that service interruptions are not uncommon. It affects how well businesses can monitor, measure and ensure the adherence to service-level agreements. So, the multicloud as we know it is a bit of a mess. It produces friction instead of freedom where data is concerned. What’s the way out? Organizations that take a proactive approach to data management—especially with regard to cost and value extraction—are the ones that typically succeed at business. If business leaders aren’t calling meetings with their CIOs to understand how they can do more with data, this needs to be addressed. There are few things more urgent that they can do than learn how to smooth their data’s path to value. In a survey commissioned by Seagate to examine multicloud complexity and probe for ways to re-imagine it, a vast majority (84%) of the surveyed global senior business leaders whose companies manage at least 1PB of unstructured data say that they know “the opportunity exists for their organization to better leverage its existing data to create business value. ” Despite this knowledge, 73% report that their organization is hampered by data retention costs. So what should they do? Pull their data out of the multicloud and put their data in only one cloud? That’s untenable for most organizations. Opt out of the friction. Multicloud is not going away anytime soon, but multicloud friction is optional. Business leaders need to bring their consumer-world expectations into the multicloud world. Ask for cloud solutions that offer ease of use, access and predictability of costs. Say no to what slows down your data. You can avail yourself of existing services that deliver those depending on the needs of your specific company. Importantly, you can take certain difference-making steps. Here are five steps you can take today that are proven to curb data costs: 1. Use predictive third-party tools that help anticipate and measure the costs of cloud resources for every deployment decision—each time. 2. Evaluate deployment criteria (performance, availability data mobility, API, user network bandwidth, etc. ) prior to deploying applications. 3. Monitor characteristics once applications are up and running. 4. For investment, prioritize tools in addition to training. 5. Automate security and protection. The organizations that enact these practices reduced their cloud storage costs by 36%. You can make the multicloud your own. You can transform it into a space where your data isn’t locked in and siloed to the point that you lose control over its security, resiliency and value. Unlike our public libraries, it makes sense for multicloud not to be free. But, in return, the least that multicloud should offer us is full control over the data that belongs to us—and the costs associated with it. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? Follow me on LinkedIn . Check out my website . Dave Mosley Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.