Akamai has established itself as one of the leading global companies in cybersecurity and cloud computing, providing market-leading solutions that empower and protect digital businesses. Its approach combines advanced threat intelligence, a global operations team, and a highly distributed cloud platform that ensures exceptional performance and excellent value for money.
In this interview, John Bradshaw, Director of Cloud Computing Technology and Strategy at Akamai, shares his insights on cloud adoption and multi-cloud strategies. From the benefits of migrating to the cloud to the challenges businesses face when implementing multi-cloud environments, Bradshaw discusses how organizations can maximize the value of their technology investments while maintaining a strategic focus on security, efficiency, and scalability.
Cloud Computing Adoption
- What percentage of your clients have migrated to the cloud, and how has this percentage evolved in recent years?
Almost all of our clients have migrated workloads to the cloud, and most of them now think cloud-first when starting a new project or initiative. However, what has not happened is a complete migration to the cloud; modern workloads, or those that need the ability to scale quickly and have higher availability requirements, are suitable candidates for the cloud.
We also see that simply adopting the cloud is not the end of the journey but just the first step; technologies and customer expectations are constantly changing.
- What are the main benefits your clients have observed when adopting cloud solutions?
The savings can be significant with cloud adoption, such as the ability to access technological resources without the large initial commitments that used to accompany any IT growth or change. This has also allowed organizations to modernize and experiment with low risk, as any mistakes, underestimations, or overestimations do not result in significant losses.
This shift from CAPEX to OPEX allows companies to better track costs with a service that provides value to their business or customers.
- Do you believe that cloud adoption in Spain is on par with other European countries? Why?
Cloud adoption in Spain is on the rise, with 27.2% of companies using cloud services in 2023. Although this figure is below the EU average of 38.9%, the market is experiencing significant growth. The public cloud sector is projected to reach $10.10 billion in 2024, with an annual growth rate of 17.16% expected to bring it to $22.30 billion by 2029 (Digital Strategy) (Statista).
This means there is a fantastic opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves in Spain; those firms that leverage the cloud and digital transformation will be better positioned to outpace their competitors.
Multi-Cloud Environment
- In your opinion, why are more companies opting for a multi-cloud environment instead of relying on a single provider?
The primary reason companies choose to develop a multi-cloud strategy is the risk of cloud concentration. If all their workloads are with a single provider and that provider experiences a catastrophic incident, all their operations will be affected. These operational impacts can range from a security vulnerability with the provider leading to data exposure or loss, to a technological incident that reduces performance or availability of a service, location, or region. Both can lead to substantial direct and indirect financial losses and, significantly, reputational damage that can take years to recover from.
Generally, it would be assumed that spending more with a single provider would result in greater negotiating power, but the opposite occurs. By concentrating technological spending on a single provider, switching costs are increased due to vendor lock-in; this lock-in occurs when solutions are directly dependent on a provider’s tool or service, or when technical debt is incurred by using proprietary technologies that do not have an open-source alternative.
- What are the main benefits of a multi-cloud strategy? And the main challenges?
The primary benefit of adopting a multi-cloud approach lies in the ability to choose the right technology from the right provider, in the right location, at the right price. This allows your teams to build better solutions to meet the needs of their users and the business instead of what is best for their provider.
This approach is not without challenges, some of which are related to how companies operate and others to how technology functions.
For example, if you have an application that uses a traditional legacy database technology, you may be commercially incentivized to run that database in the cloud of a particular provider. The application that uses the database could run elsewhere at a substantially lower cost than on that first provider’s cloud, thereby giving you the best of both worlds. However, this only works if you have a mature service management and operations function that can handle a mixed-provider application.
- How do you help companies manage the complexity involved in implementing a multi-cloud environment?
Akamai’s approach to the cloud is that it must be open and portable. We support our clients in their multi-cloud aims by building the platform on open source ‘Cloud primitives’ (the fundamental components for cloud creation), and we have avoided developing internal managed services that cannot be migrated without refactoring.
Our KubernetesKubernetes (commonly referred to in English as “K8s”) … platform is fully CNCF certified, which means that if your container runs with us, it will run anywhere else.
We also recently announced the Akamai Application Platform; an open-source solution designed to automate the typical repetitive work of setting up a new Kubernetes cluster, services like RBAC, CI/CD, and observability, potentially saving hundreds of developer hours. Your data and applications should be able to run anywhere and with any provider you choose.