In the past, you had a room somewhere in your office that housed all your servers. And servers were by definition, physical hardware boxes. Then came virtual servers, and then came reductions of your own servers and the move to buying services from external cloud vendors.
Today most customers strive to have a blend of subscription services provided by ISVs for ERP systems, sales and marketing support systems, messaging, websites and many other categories that create a large web of services. Your cloud assets will probably be powered by cloud platform providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google – for some services you get a direct bill and for others you buy indirect through the ISV providing you the SaaS solution that you use.
Most customers today will opt for subscriptions instead of buying and hosting the systems themselves, whenever it is possible. Customers today will have their assets spread out on multiple cloud providers -sometimes they’re renting servers and sometimes they subscribe to services.
It is fairly common that cloud solutions are being decommissioned and replaced with better ones so the landscape of where your assets are will change gradually over time. But it is often the same people taking care of operations even when vendors shift – having the right people is really strategic. And having great partners is perhaps even more important now than ever before as you will need someone that masters this new universe of multi-clouds and multi-vendors, who can both take care of managing your assets as well as acts as your trusted advisor. The era of multi-clouds and multi-vendors is here and you will need great partners to take the most advantage of it!