In the IDG Connect Management Brief _The Year of Multicloud: Using NaaS to Deploy Your Strategy_, IDC dives into the rise of NaaS, why the ecosystem matters, and why multicloud increasingly means cloud-to-cloud.

Research firm IDC predicts that by 2022, 90% of enterprises around the world will rely on a mix of multicloud and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. Multicloud adoption accelerated during the widespread disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and IDC projects that 2021 will be the “year of multicloud.” 

But what does that mean for your business?

Download The Year of Multicloud: Using NaaS to Deploy Your Strategy, an IDG Connect Management Brief.

For businesses still using traditional connectivity methods such as multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) circuits or private lines to interconnect customer sites and/or third-party data centers, the rise of Network as a Service (NaaS) presents an opportunity to modernize legacy networks and better prepare them for rapidly changing business environments. 

Companies that were primarily using these traditional ways of connecting to the cloud likely found themselves locked into term contracts with their telco providers, unable to scale up and down as the pandemic ravaged some industries, such as travel and hospitality, and bolstered others, like high tech. Meanwhile, companies that used NaaS were able to remain agile, keep control of networking costs, and maintain a reliable and diverse network.

Read 5 Reasons You Should Modernize and Software-Define Your MPLS Network.

The customer benefits of NaaS

In the case of ICE, the financial marketplace operator that owns the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), using Megaport’s NaaS allowed them to offer cloud-based access to their market-leading data services through IGN Cloud Connect from any public cloud environment including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. They were able to do so efficiently by leveraging Megaport’s ready-made private network backbone, which is global and connected to over 225 cloud on-ramps and over 700 data center locations worldwide.

The benefits to ICE customers were far ranging. A trade surveillance and market risk platform servicing compliance and risk desks with infrastructure migrated from on-premises to AWS was able to access ICE Consolidated Feed directly in their AWS environment without having to invest in colocation. A retail broker dealer, who was already in the cloud, was able to access key US equity and options markets from their public cloud provider of choice.

Download the ICE case study to learn more about IGN Cloud Connect.

Another leading market data vendor used Megaport’s NaaS to support disaster recovery and contingency planning, knowing that they could spin up scalable, on-demand backbone connectivity in the event of spikes in market data demand spurred by the many unprecedented global events of 2020.

Multicloud cloud-to-cloud connectivity

Multicloud adoption was a major driver for Cisco’s recent collaboration with Megaport. Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) allows customers to turn up branch-to-cloud connectivity to their multicloud deployments in minutes, rather than the weeks it would take to provision MPLS circuits from a carrier. According to the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 93% of enterprises have developed a multicloud strategy, and 87% have a hybrid cloud one. Meanwhile, IaaS is forecast to grow 23.9% year over year according to Gartner’s Public Cloud Services Forecast.  

Learn more about Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) with Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect.

MVE brings private connectivity to multicloud deployments closer to edge devices, branch offices, and remote workers, optimizing last- and middle-mile connectivity. It reduces an enterprise WAN’s dependence on the unpredictable and inconsistent best-effort connectivity provided by the public internet. IDC projects that the worldwide edge computing market will reach $250.6 billion USD in 2024 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5%. 

Read more about how companies are future-proofing their enterprise networks. 

A cloud-first future

Ultimately, IDC’s prediction that 2021 will be the year of multicloud is a harbinger of a broader shift by enterprises toward cloud-first digital transformation initiatives.

Richard L. Villars, Group Vice President of IDC writes: “By the end of 2021, based on lessons learned in the pandemic, most enterprises will put a mechanism in place to accelerate their shift to cloud-centric digital infrastructure and application services twice as fast as before the pandemic.”

Download the report

Read The Year of Multicloud: Using NaaS to Deploy Your Strategy, an IDG Connect Management Brief, courtesy of Megaport now.