Multicloud: The advantages, disadvantages, and how to know you’re ready

Dynamic, ambitious organizations are increasingly operating their workloads across multiple cloud vendors. Multicloud adoption is slowly becoming the dominant mode of digitization. Assessing the upsides and downsides of multicloud is crucial - but the core themes that link them all are perhaps more important.

The advantages

Innovation and choice

If the cloud offers businesses greater opportunities when it comes to innovation and expansion (not to mention cost-savings), then multicloud promises to take this to the next level. The reason is choice. When you switch to multicloud, you’re no longer just limited to the services offered by a single vendor. You can begin to cherry-pick the services and applications that are best suited to your business. Platform A might offer the best efficiency gains for your CMS. Platform B might be better tooled for the iteration, test, and launch of new products. The opportunity of leveraging the scale and capabilities of multiple world-leading tech vendors – in a manner uniquely tailored to your specific business needs - is what makes multicloud solutions so appealing.

Need help choosing the right cloud platform for your organization? We know mutiple clouds - contact us to learn more.

Financial flexibility

The issue of choice above mitigates the drawback of ‘Vendor Lock-in’ – the perennial IT problem of being so dependent on a vendor that the costs of moving elsewhere are prohibitive. Multicloud also mitigates this risk from a financial point of view. When you operate in multicloud mode, you are often in a better negotiating position when it comes to costs and contracts. A vendor may be less reluctant to increase charges or change terms if it knows you have other options available.

Business continuity and product risk reduction

All the leading hyper-scale cloud vendors – Microsoft, AWS, Google – operate data centers in all geographic regions to service their clients. When you deploy a multicloud approach, if one vendor suffers an outage, it is reassuring to know you have other options for business recovery and continuity.

In a similar vein, if one vendor discontinues or downgrades a particular service that is pivotal for your business, being able to embrace a similar service from a cloud vendor you already partner with can minimize business interruption.

Complexity increases

Multicloud adoption increases the complexity of your business. Adding another software vendor doubles the processes you will need to master. The level of insight and transparency required – not to mention technical expertise – is serious. Adequately managing costs, licensing, compliance, consumption, and security will stretch your organization. The move to multicloud requires a strategy that will take a holistic view of your entire operation. Consuming cloud services from multiple vendors without a core strategy in place is an operational and financial dead-end. That still doesn’t stop it from happening though.

Is juggling multiple clouds giving you a headache? Our team of multicloud experts help you optimize your operations. Contact us to learn more.

Hiring and retaining staff

Finding and hiring the expert software and architects you will need for a multicloud deployment is neither straightforward nor cheap. Skilled operatives are in high demand and short supply. Re-tooling and retraining existing staff to enable your organization to fully exploit the potential of multicloud is a serious operational task. Moreover, any serious Cloud adoption strategy will require fundamental changes to how your business is structured and how it is managed. Are you ready?

Security problems

It will not surprise you to learn that embracing a multicloud solution exposes your business to a potential increase in IT security risks. Keeping your enterprise safe in one cloud requires profound attention to detail. The increasing complexity of a multicloud implementation gives bad actors a larger target to aim at. Configuring and managing security, encryption, and compliance across multiple environments is mission-critical. Individual human errors and mistakes – particularly in the areas of access control and ID verification – are weak spots that can multiply exposure points.

Expertise is often not transferable

Being deeply embedded in one Could stack and doesn’t mean you will know enough (or anything) about another. Why? Because every Cloud vendor has its own unique processes, billings, systems, and solutions. There are different demands, different apps, and different infrastructure and technical aspects to perfect. Apps and services are not easily switched from one Cloud to another. This is not a plug-and-play world. You need access to expertise and sound advice.

Our team of experts know multiple

Being cloud mature - and finding an expert partner – is the best way forward

Being aware of all of the pros and cons of a multicloud deployment has a degree of utility. But perhaps the best way to get ready to embrace a multicloud deployment is to make sure you are already an expert – and reaping business rewards - in one cloud platform. A single ‘Cloud family’ has thousands of moving parts. Only when you have mastered one provider can you begin to think about adding another.

If you’ve got this fundamental plank in place, SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) is your ideal partner for the next stage. We have deep relationships with all the major global hyper-scale cloud providers and unrivaled experience when it comes to helping clients plan and execute end-to-end digitization strategies. Our deep experience within Software & Cloud Economics - we are a Gartner Magic Quadrant Global Leader in Software & Cloud Asset management – will enable you to manage costs and continually optimize your digital estate in the multicloud environment to ensure it delivers the return on your IT investments you demand.

SoftwareOne services for multicloud environment

We support thousands of organizations during their cloud journey: our service offerings span assessment of your organization's cloud maturity, to selecting the right platforms and services for your workloads, as well as providing architectural reviews, cost optimization, and improvements to your organization's cloud governance, and security posture.