Charting the Course: Hybrid Multicloud Strategies and AI Adoption in Canada

Canadian organizations have undergone a "learning curve" when it comes to cloud, with the initial wave of "cloud first" investments resulting in repatriations and the realization that a strategic approach yields far superior business outcomes. This applies to infrastructure investments as well; Canadian organizations continue to plan on moving away from traditional data centres to the cloud (public and private), albeit at a cautious pace. This is largely due to technical debt, long-term contracts, lack of skills and compliance.

Canadian organizations will eventually have a digital infrastructure footprint that will be a mix of various on-premises and cloud (public and private) infrastructure deployments allowing for flexibility, visibility and control, making management and optimization of this infrastructure more critical than ever.

The alignment between IT, cloud, business and developer teams is critical when it comes to spending, operationalizing and developing strategic roadmaps to scale digital infrastructure adoption. The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report  found that only two in five Canadian organizations leverage a centre of excellence (CoE) model – where a team of highly skilled, experienced and innovative employees or managers are brought together to collaborate on technology strategies and investments – to ensure internal alignment on their digital infrastructure strategy.

As with the adoption of any technology, Canadian organizations must address a series of concerns that will impact their ability to achieve business outcomes. As per the 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report:

• 44 percent of respondents indicated that they were concerned about rising cybersecurity threats
• 40 percent were concerned about the rise in digital infrastructure costs
• 35 percent indicated a lack of understanding among business users on how digital infrastructure can support their business strategy.

To address these concerns, Canadian organizations are investing in solutions around infrastructure resiliency, management and automation.

The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report finds that nearly 60 percent of respondents will leverage multiple public clouds over the next two years. However, one-third indicated having little to no interoperability between them. Canadian organizations still need to mature when it comes to managing and running multicloud environments.

• One of the main reasons Canadian organizations use hybrid multicloud deployments is to leverage unique capabilities from different providers (best of breed) while optimizing application performance and cloud costs to meet business unit preferences.
• As hybrid and multicloud deployments continue to rise, it will also result in challenges such as having to deal with changes to cloud offerings and pricing, availability of IT skills, consistency around security and compliance, IT staff and processes optimization, and migration of workloads to the best cloud option in real-time.

Hybrid multicloud management deployments require organizations to ensure they have the right solutions to manage the environment, which can otherwise result in a digital infrastructure/cloud sprawl that can impact cost, deployment, governance and compliance.

One of the types of solutions organizations need to consider is unified management control planes. The study highlights only one-third of respondents indicated implementing a unified management control plane, while the remaining are either planning or in the early stages of consideration/pilots.

A unified management control plane provides IT teams with the ability to manage, monitor and control various infrastructure deployments, be it on-premises, at the edge, hybrid or multicloud. It provides a centralized view resulting in improved visibility, efficiency, security, scalability, cost tracking and compliance.

• Organizations also need to have a strategy around cloud management to manage their cloud sprawl. However, only 36 percent of Canadian organizations that were surveyed indicated using a unified cloud management platform. The rest of the respondents used a combination of cloud-native, open source and home-grown tools or a mix of best-of-breed solutions. This makes cloud management complex, inefficient and cumbersome.
• As Canadian organizations contend with distributed environments with the deployment of cloud, deployment of IoT and the integration of IT and OT technologies, they need to have real-time visibility of the workloads across the disparate environments. This makes observability critical.
• Unfortunately, Canadian organizations have limited observability maturity. A self-assessment of their observability maturity within the survey yielded only 5 percent having highly observable environments. A similar trend was observed across segments. From an industry perspective, financial services indicated a greater degree of maturity compared to the rest, with 20 percent of financial services organizations highlighting highly observable IT environments.

The consumerization of AI via OpenAI's ChatGPT has made AI accessible, driving consumer curiosity and experimentation. Organizations leveraging AI, especially GenAI, expect benefits around productivity, efficiency, cost savings and improved customer and employee experience.

The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report finds that 55 percent of Canadian organizations are investing in AI, including GenAI. The adoption of GenAI is largely based on use cases, and organizations need to arrive at the list of use cases that will help drive positive business outcomes. The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report also found that Canadian organizations are investing in all types of AI – interpretive, predictive and generative, with GenAI accounting for one-third of significant AI initiatives.

Organizations need to have a holistic approach to AI or ensure they have a fully scalable AI value chain covering elements such as infrastructure, foundation models, platforms, applications, security and governance. Success across AI initiatives is dependent on the data, infrastructure and tools organizations leverage to manage and curate the data across projects. The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report asked Canadian organizations to gauge the level of readiness of their data infrastructure to handle AI challenges. Only 3 percent of organizations indicated that their data infrastructure was ready to handle AI challenges.

This lack of readiness requires organizations to improve their capabilities to ensure that their digital infrastructure can allow for a more AI-friendly data architecture. These capability improvements span both technologies and processes. The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report highlighted that organizations needed to improve in areas such as:

• Prevention of sensitive data from being used for AI training
• Attestation for traceability/error detection
• Scalability
• Data migration between infrastructures
• Support for streaming/real-time data processing

The use of AI is not new to organizations; they have been leveraging AI/ML capabilities across several solutions to offer insights and recommendations such as within data and analytics, anti-money laundering solutions, risk management solutions and cloud management solutions. As stated, GenAI has democratized AI, and the use cases vary according to productivity, business function and organization or industry.

The success of leveraging cloud services, AI/ML and IoT to achieve business objectives is largely dependent on an organization's data management practices. Organizations need to invest in the right skills, technologies and processes to ensure robust data management practices.

Nearly half of Canadian organizations are leaning toward SaaS-based solutions or leveraging their cloud platform provider, while 40 percent indicated that they are leaning toward manual or on-premises solutions. To meet data privacy and compliance requirements, some data sets may have to be managed on-premises.

As per the 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report, over the next 12 months, Canadian organizations plan to improve their data security and privacy, and the quality of data and analytics used for decision-making. Canadian organizations also plan to improve the efficiency of data management and analytics activities and to leverage automation. These capabilities reflect the need for a robust data management strategy that will allow for a great utilization of data to enable innovation, drive productivity and enhance decision-making.

Canadian organizations have been investing in IoT over the past few years to gain operational efficiency and improve decision-making, experiences and differentiation. This has resulted in investment in edge infrastructure to ensure performance, latency, security and reliability. The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report highlights that 81 percent of Canadian organizations have IoT projects in production, but only 35 percent realized rapid payback.

Canadian organizations have been investing in IoT over the past few years to gain operational efficiency and improve decision-making, experiences and differentiation. This has resulted in investment in edge infrastructure to ensure performance, latency, security and reliability. The 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report highlights that 81 percent of Canadian organizations have IoT projects in production, but only 35 percent realized rapid payback.