Your data glut is only going to grow, but you can make it work for you with an intentional multicloud strategy.

Embracing as-a-service is one way you can defy data gravity concerns and reduce your storage footprint.

Among the major concerns CIOs have shared with me in recent years has been the proliferation of applications and services across their complex IT environments.

These captains of enterprise IT run startling amounts of critical business-critical software, not to mention intelligent infrastructure and cybersecurity tools and experimental apps across a mix of on-premises systems and various clouds. Increasingly, this includes multiple public cloud providers, the choice du jour.

These uneasy CIOs told me that the more apps they poured onto these public cloud platforms, the greater the recurring costs. And as they stitched more cloud apps together, they found they needed to run many of them across multiple clouds, sometimes based on compliance requirements abroad.

Aside from the monthly clouds bills ratcheting as compute cycles and capacity soared, the riskier it became to decouple, let alone extricate these interdependent apps and services.

And as these apps ran—sometimes continuously—the greater the amount of data they created. Which naturally made them harder to move. Their software portfolios brimmed with data.

That inexorable weight these IT leaders were dishing on? Data gravity.

Data gravity, a phrase software engineer wizard Dave McCrory coined in 2010, describes data’s increasing pull – attracting applications and services that use the data, as it grows.

Wherever data is stored, left unmanaged, massive data growth can render data difficult or even impossible to process or move, creating an expensive headache for businesses. Running machine learning systems alone generates tremendous amounts of data, as ingesting, transforming and analyzing this data is a heavy, costly lift.

To be clear, data gravity is not unique to clouds. It has always existed and is likely still running in your data centers—I’m looking at you, uber-customized ERPs and software. And their data footprint isn’t getting smaller, let alone easier to move.

Related: Is as-a-Service a Cure for Cloud Sprawl?

But clouds, thanks to the Cambrian explosion known as the API Economy and the increase in apps spanning multiple environments, have become huge galaxies of data. They are thus ever bound by the laws of data gravity.

The more apps that are connected in clouds, the larger the data volume grows, thus the greater the gravitational pull. Moreover, data gravity feeds the growing data sprawl—the phenomenon of data proliferating across multiple connected apps, clouds and environments, particularly as more companies incorporate data-hungry tools, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and edge devices—into their operations.

How much data are we talking about here? It’s hard to quantify, but since I’m on a gravity and galaxies theme, consider this data point: According to the World Economic Forum, “At the beginning of 2020, the number of bytes in the digital universe was 40 times bigger than the number of stars in the observable universe.”

The number of bytes in the digital universe was 40 times bigger than the number of stars in the observable universe. Let that sink in for a moment. And understand that data gravity continues to prevail.

But here’s the thing: The gravity challenges are only going to grow.

Data is the lifeblood of your business and the attendant stakeholders are going to generate loads more of it. And while you are running the business, you still must transform the business, which requires insights powered by, of course, data.

Data is one of the trends fueling digital transformation today, as Dell Co-Chief Operating Officer Chuck Whitten recently noted during Dell Technologies World. “A company’s ability to make sense of it and take action is the difference between competitive advantage and obsolescence,” Whitten said.

For example, data drives innovation in everything from autonomous motor vehicles, to analytics that informs critical corporate decision-making, fraud detection, speech recognition and natural language processing. Data enriches machine learning technologies that personalize applications, providing differentiated digital experiences for consumers and business apps.

There are myriad examples. What’s important to understand is the pursuit of capabilities that propel you to competitive advantages is a big reason why you need to manage your data and make it work for you. Data gravity is here to stay.

Absolute control is an illusion in data gravity just as it is in traditional gravity as we humans know it. In fact, 31 percent of IT decision makers cited managing data as the single biggest challenge in moving to a multicloud strategy, according to a recent Forrester Opportunity Snapshot study commissioned by Dell Technologies.

Some IT leaders have flirted with cloud repatriation—the practice of retrieving services from public clouds and running them on-premises or in a private cloud. Sometimes the cost-benefit ratio of refactoring something for the public cloud isn’t there, so they move it and eat the data egress fees, which are large. Repatriation is more of a app-by-app solution as companies continue to figure out their multicloud strategy, which is the current hot trend.

Edge computing—the practice of processing more data in the devices dotting the edge of your networks—helps alleviate some of the gravity pains. And while it is increasingly viewed as a key component of multicloud strategies, the practice is still emerging.

No, the emerging trend I’m referring to is multicloud by design. That is, a fit-for-purpose ecosystem where you can use an abstraction layer to migrate workloads between private and public clouds, colocation facilities and the edge, avoiding vendor lock-in.

Imagine that. You’ll connect data between clouds with more consistency and pay for capacity you use without fear of getting gouged on egress. By embracing this cloud-adjacent, as-a-Service approach, you can create one common data store that connects to all major public cloud providers simultaneously, enabling you to defy data gravity concerns and reduce your storage footprint.

I’d byte on that.

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