It seems almost quaint that organizations once wondered whether they should move to the cloud. Today, virtually every organization is using some form of cloud, with the vast majority adopting a multi-cloud strategy.
As the name implies, a multi-cloud model involves the use of more than one cloud service. It’s not the same as a hybrid cloud, in which public and private clouds are integrated into a common management framework. Multi-cloud simply means that organizations are implementing multiple cloud platforms and providers to support various infrastructure and application needs.
According to the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report, 85 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, up from 82 percent in 2016. On average, organizations are using 1.8 public clouds while experimenting with 1.8 more, and leveraging 2.3 private clouds while experimenting with 2.1 more.
Survey respondents say they’ve moved 41 percent of their workloads to the public cloud and 38 percent to private clouds. Overall, the challenges associated with cloud adoption have also declined since the 2016 report.
"The RightScale 2017 survey showed that enterprise multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption continues to grow, and even with that growth, challenges are decreasing," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "Companies report using eight different clouds on average. Optimizing cloud costs is the top cloud initiative. Cloud challenges, including security concerns, continue to abate.”
Strength in Numbers
There are sound business reasons for implementing a multi-cloud strategy. The use of multiple clouds enables organizations to select the cloud service that best meets the requirements of a particular application or workload. Organizations can also leverage cloud services in multiple geographies, which can reduce latency by placing applications, services and content nearer to end-users, and meet increasingly stringent data sovereignty requirements of government and industry regulations.
In addition, the multi-cloud model can reduce the risk of downtime through redundancy. Although service provider outages are not as common and pervasive as they once were, the potential risk to customers is greater than ever. As organizations continue to migrate more mission-critical workloads to the cloud, an outage or performance degradation can severely damage their operations.
Despite these advantages, a multi-cloud strategy creates management and operational challenges. In the RightScale report, expertise, security and spending tied for No. 1, each cited by 25 percent of respondents as a major concern.
Although the cloud masks some IT complexity, it does not eliminate the operational burden. Organizations must dedicate time and resources toward learning and managing the cloud platforms they use. Furthermore, traditional siloed IT operations are not conducive to effective cloud management. A multi-cloud strategy demands a cross-functional team capable of monitoring, optimizing and securing multiple platforms and tiers across hundreds of applications.
Keeping Costs in Check
At a more functional level, a multi-cloud strategy increases the difficulty of integrating cloud services with existing IT infrastructure. Organizations that rely upon the open Internet for cloud connectivity lack secure, reliable and scalable access to a multi-cloud environment. However, respondents to this year’s RightScale survey were less concerned about security than they were in 2016.
According to the report, more organizations are focusing on managing cloud costs. In fact, optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative across all cloud users (53 percent), particularly among mature cloud users (64 percent). Twenty-four percent of mature cloud users cited costs as their top cloud challenge.
Survey respondents estimate that 30 percent of their cloud spend is wasted, while RightScale has calculated actual waste to be between 30 percent and 45 percent. Despite an increased focus on cloud cost management, however, relatively few companies are taking critical actions to reduce expenditures, such as shutting down unused workloads or selecting lower-cost clouds or regions.
It's not clear whether organizations consciously adopt a multi-cloud strategy, or simply wind up there by implementing multiple cloud platforms. Either way, the multi-cloud model can deliver a number of business benefits, even if it forces organizations to rethink many aspects of their IT environment and operations. Today, the question isn’t whether to move to the cloud but how many different cloud services to use.
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