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CHAPTER 1 Understanding Enterprise IT Challenges 7 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Multi-cloud environments, consisting of multiple public, private, and/or hybrid clouds, also introduce new security challenges. According to the "RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report," 84 percent of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy, aver- aging almost five clouds per organization. Even more recently, edge computing activities have further eroded what were once solid boundaries, spelling doom for the previously reliable effi- cacy of physical datacenter doors and the edge firewall. Today, the need for perimeter security still exists, but it's being augmented by a plethora of other security services as IT departments scram- ble to keep pace with attackers. A hybrid cloud provides application and data interoperability between two or more clouds, whereas multi-cloud does not nec- essarily provide interoperability between clouds. For example, an organization might use both AWS and Microsoft Azure pub- lic cloud resources as stand-alone environments, in which case it would be considered a multi-cloud environment. However, if that same organization connected its AWS and Microsoft Azure public cloud resources so that applications and data could be exchanged between these two public clouds, it would be considered a hybrid cloud environment. Put another way, a hybrid cloud environment is always a multi-cloud environment (because it consists of two or more clouds) but a multi-cloud environment is not always a hybrid cloud environment (because it does not necessarily provide interoperability between the clouds). Understanding Datacenter Architecture Options Although enterprise IT departments face challenges today that couldn't even have been dreamed up a couple of decades ago, all kinds of opportunities are available to them to address these issues head on. To do that, IT leaders and professionals need a clear understanding of the options at their disposal. They need to be able to assess whether these options can solve their needs.