Why Are We Moving to Plural Clouds? From “An Insider’s Guide to Cloud Computing” So, why the sudden move to multicloud? While it might seem as though multicloud suddenly showed up as a new cloud computing concept overnight, it’s been steadily growing and evolving for years. Like most things that become famous, it didn’t just happen overnight. People just finally noticed. I have a saying about multicloud: Whether it’s found on purpose or by accident, multicloud is an inevitable reality for most enterprises. In its most simplistic form, multicloud leverages more than a single cloud provider, meaning two or more public cloud providers. While private clouds can be part of a multicloud, most multiclouds leverage multiple public cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google. Or even those three and Oracle and Alibaba. Don’t fall into the semantic arguments that are taking place around the definition of multicloud; it’s just any cloud deployment that leverages more than one public cloud provider. In the beginning of multicloud, many enterprises leveraged a single cloud provider and slid into multi- cloud almost by accident. There were always exceptions being made as developers and end users found some vital public cloud service that was not part of the preferred cloud provider’s services for the enterprise. Ta-da. The enterprise became a multicloud user. In many of my clients’ enterprises, IT denied that the other cloud(s) existed. A network scan will reveal other clouds in use on the enterprise network. Ta-da again. The enterprise has a multicloud. Multicloud followed the same pattern of adoption we saw in the “IT Showdown” movement when employees used their company credit cards to adopt SaaS-based systems, typically to circumvent corporate IT because they were sick of hearing “No.” This is how many companies first entered the cloud. IT got dragged in kicking and screaming when their outlaw users adopted cloud for them and then pushed the resulting problems back to IT when administration and security of those SaaS clouds got too hard and too costly. Adoption of multicloud followed much the same patterns, but now IT is usually aware that it’s happening, either on purpose or not. “Not on purpose” means that a series of exceptions were made to leverage cloud services from other IaaS cloud providers other than the IT-set standard. So, Cloud A could be an enterprise’s primary provider, typically with many past press releases to promote the “partnership.” The new normal is that the number of other IaaS public cloud providers in use is in double digits. Moreover, clouds are still being added to the mix because specialty cloud services are needed that the existing cloud service provider can’t supply for one reason or another. Obviously, “on purpose” is the way you should adopt any technology, multicloud included. It shouldn’t just happen, but instead unfold around a well-th…
