Do the cons of multi-cloud weigh heavier than its pros?

Back in the early 2000s, when I was fresh out of college, ‘the cloud’ was taking over. Its potential was being lauded, some courageous leaders were testing the waters, and for IT professionals, a dramatic change was on the horizon. Fast-forward a decade from then, ‘the cloud’ which was treated as a singular noun, has given way to a multitude of cloud services. Multi-cloud has become the talk of the IT town.

But the advent of multi-cloud was purely accidental…

In some organizations, when business units were faced with the need to automate quickly to stay competitive, they reached out for support through SaaS, integrated into their existing infrastructure through IaaS, all of which often happened with little knowledge of the IT team. This unconsciously led to various services like CRM, human resources, marketing automation, and supply chain management being spread across multiple cloud providers. Alongside, the IT team’s engagement with infrastructure services online, given the ease and speed of deployment in comparison to the on-premise data center led to the proliferation of multi-cloud presence.

Several organizations have unintenionaly landed up in multi-cloud to avoid vendor lock-in, for a better mix and match of features, for competitive pricing, or to avoid a single point of failure. 

All along, you can see that multi-cloud was never a conscious strategic move by most organizations. 

So, is there a downside to going multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud comes with its fair share of challenges as listed below:

1. Fragmentation of data: Multi-cloud impacts visibility. With data spread across multiple cloud infrastructures, tracking which applications are running and where the data is becoming considerably hard, leading to compliance and governance issues. In fact, IT teams are spending up to 30-70% of their time in managing data and apps in the multi-cloud environment, which should ideally not have been the case. One of the first concerns that multi-cloud has posed to IT teams across sectors is the vulnerability to data loss, compounded by a lack of visibility.
2. Administrative headaches: Finding people with versatile skill-sets to work across multiple cloud providers is a tough ask. For IT professionals who were once only expected to know one cloud are now grappling to work across numerous. For organizations this can mean additional time and resources to upskill the staff or segregation of the team into separate groups to work on different cloud platforms, leading to the formation of silos, neither of which are ideal solutions. 
3. Higher costs: Multi-cloud makes tracking of costs difficult which in turn also leads to compromises and increased cost. Multi-cloud has a huge dependency on third-party tooling which are often not as feature-rich as the native tools provided by the cloud provider, which takes a hit on the cost. Also, with different vendors having their own pricing models, budgeting and tracking costs get doubly complicated.

Given these challenges, is multi-cloud ever a good strategy for your business?

The foundation of a multi-cloud strategy should be to have a bird's eye view of what data can be put where to access it in the most efficient way and get the best value out of it.

Don’t get bogged down by the complexity of multi-cloud or the challenges that come with it. It is possible for organizations to architect clear strategies to unlock the full potential of multi-cloud. 

Organizations need to first assess their needs and match choices of varied cloud platforms to these needs. For start-ups and smaller organizations, opting for a single cloud environment can work well for starters. This will save costs and enable businesses with lesser technical adaptability. As the organization grows and requirements build, adopting multiple cloud service providers can be beneficial. For larger organizations that are already engaging multiple cloud service providers, assessing your strategy, making deliberate choices based on use cases and choosing options on the basis of data governance, security and disaster recovery over others can be important in driving the success of multi-cloud while also having ample control over these environments.

So, do multi-cloud’s cons weigh heavier than its pros?

No, not if organizations are ready to make the once unintentional choice of going multi-cloud an intentional and conscious one with a well-charted out strategy.