The problem with this approach is that it often leads to "a sprawling set of systems and disparate teams working on these cloud systems, making it difficult to keep up with the pace of innovation," says Bernardo Caldas, corporate vice president of Azure Edge product management at Microsoft. In addition to being an IT headache, a fragmented cloud environment leads to technological and organizational repercussions.

A complex multi-cloud deployment can make it difficult for IT teams to perform mission-critical tasks, such as applying security patches, meeting regulatory requirements, managing costs, and accessing data for data analytics. Configuring and securing these types of environments is a challenging and time-consuming task. And ad hoc cloud deployments often culminate in systems incompatibility when one-off pilots are ready to scale or be combined with existing products.

Without a common IT operations and application development platform, teams can't share lessons learned or pool important resources, which tends to cause them to become increasingly siloed. "People want to do more with their data, but if their data is trapped and isolated in these different systems, it can make it really hard to tap into the data for insights and to accelerate progress," says Caldas.

As the pace of change accelerates, however, many organizations are adopting a new adaptive cloud approach -- one that will enable them to respond quickly to evolving consumer demands and market fluctuations while simplifying the management of their complex cloud environments.

Heralding a departure from yesteryear's fragmented cloud environments, an adaptive cloud approach unites sprawling systems, disparate silos, and distributed sites into a single operations, development, security, application, and data model. This unified approach empowers organizations to glean value from cloud-native, open source, and AI technologies across hybrid, multi-cloud, edge, and IoT.

"You've got a lot of legacy software out there, and for the most part, you don't want to change production environments," says David Harmon, director of software engineering at AMD. "Nobody wants to change code. So while CTOs and developers really want to take advantage of all the hardware changes, they want to do nothing to their code base if possible, because that change is very, very expensive."

An adaptive cloud approach answers this challenge by taking an agnostic approach to the environments it brings together on a single control plane. By seamlessly collecting disparate computing environments, including those that run outside of hyperscale data centers, the control plane creates greater visibility across thousands of assets, simplifies security enforcement, and allows for easier management.

An adaptive cloud approach enables unified management of disparate systems and resources, leading to improved oversight and control. An adaptive approach also creates scalability, as it allows organizations to meet the fluctuating demands of a business without the risk of over-provisioning or under-provisioning resources.

There are also clear business advantages to embracing an adaptive cloud approach. Consider, for example, an operational technology team that deploys an automation system to accelerate a factory's production capabilities. In a fragmented and distributed environment, systems often struggle to communicate. But in an adaptive cloud environment, a factory's automation system can easily be connected to the organization's customer relationship management system, providing sales teams with real-time insights into supply-demand fluctuations.