Can multicloud be simplified to the point where anything’s possible?

Today, multicloud is the new reality – and it will be so tomorrow. We don’t believe it’s true that all organisations are on a journey to deploy workloads to a single hyperscaler – and the research supports that view.

As many as 76% of cloud buyers now use multiple cloud providers. More than half of organisations are planning hybrid cloud deployments between private and public cloud; 48% plan to increase their cloud spending; and 66% want to improve their cloud security this year.

Multicloud is the cloud market from now on. But your journey isn’t likely to be linear. To set yourself up for success, expect a continuous cycle of transformation and optimisation, delivering incremental improvements and increased value with each step.

Most organisations understand they must overcome some challenges in adopting cloud, and those challenges are multiplied with multiple clouds.

This is never simple, whether it’s managing multiple cloud partners; creating secure, consistent environments across managed public cloud, on-premises and private cloud platforms; or juggling the needs of traditional and cloud-native applications.

Along with increased complexity comes increased cyber crime vulnerability. Your business growth can also slow down to a snail’s pace when governance, risk and compliance measures become increasingly onerous. Given that most cloud vendors are seeking some form of lock-in agreement, managing multicloud landscapes can be costly, too. Even getting visibility of your entire estate doesn’t come cheap.

Add to this the upskilling of your organisation to manage two of the major public-cloud operators and a private cloud, for example, and suddenly your investment in people, processes and certifications becomes massive. It’s no mystery why as many as 70% of businesses rely on managed cloud services providers like us to help them keep things simpler.

Lawter is a Belgian chemicals manufacturer and a longstanding client of ours. Initially, they moved to us from an incumbent supplier to manage their SAP estate on top of a private cloud. We’re now moving those same workloads from private cloud onto Azure, all while delivering a consistent managed service for their SAP Basis environment. We’re giving them full flexibility to choose the flavour of multicloud they need, but with the consistency and simplicity of our managed services.

All cloud challenges are hard to solve without skilled employees. And unless you have an enormous IT budget, you’re unlikely to have a deep bench. All of this slows your pace of innovation because your staff is focused elsewhere. Getting new services to market requires fast development – which is one of the reasons why cloud spending is no longer just the domain of the CIO. It’s not only about cost savings for the lines of business, but also about using cloud services to invest and innovate.

Another of our clients, Henkel, a chemicals manufacturer, was driven by the need to simplify a complex environment of multiple hybrid and on-premises contact centres into a single, cloud-based solution. Following our successfully orchestrated, remote migration during COVID-19, the cloud-based contact centre solution now gives them the flexibility to effectively manage their costs while introducing digital channels and operational enhancements that their customers and service teams were awaiting.

Multicloud as a service is about realising the art of the possible. Because you often use more than one cloud provider, it should make it simpler to manage complexity. But it should also give you cloud multi-vision so you can have your eyes and ears everywhere across your IT estate in an instant, combined with the intelligence and insight that modern technologies like AI and predictive analytics deliver to put you in control.

And when it comes to innovation, you’ll want to take the brakes off, which means you need to optimise your application workloads through application modernisation and hosting initiatives aimed at freeing up your employees. With multicloud, innovation is well within your reach.