During the last three years, cloud has been a key priority at Monsanto for three reasons. As a digital company, we knew our data needs and volume would expand rapidly over time. Secondly, we knew that where we wanted to go – in terms of high-end modeling, IoT, and workplace productivity – required the use of scalable, leading-edge hardware and technology. And third, and perhaps most importantly, our value proposition depended on it.
Our value lies in delivering digital tools, analytics, and technology to enable our growing business internally and externally. As a large company, it would take a significant investment in infrastructure to stay current. But keeping infrastructure evergreen isn’t our goal – it’s leveraging that infrastructure with modern technology to achieve business outcomes. For that, cloud-based computing was the only solution.
Public, private, or hybrid cloud?
Currently, as part of our cloud strategy, we have a big footprint with multiple public cloud providers and are exploring others as part of our “not one public cloud provider approach.” We also maintain a private cloud for things we want to keep internal.
When we first set out to make a decision around the cloud, we knew we wanted to get out of owning our own data center and migrate to a combination of private and public cloud. We consciously decided not to go all in on public cloud because there were things we wanted to keep internal, as well as things we didn’t want to re-platform to make cloud-ready. We needed to get up and running with a hybrid model to support our core business, and it gave us flexibility to make public-or-private cloud decisions along the way based on the specific strategies we wanted to apply.