A Firsthand Look at Managing Enterprise Multi-Cloud Complexity

In May 2020, McKinsey & Company released an article touting the pandemic as a transformation accelerator, “thrusting companies five years into the digital future in a matter of eight weeks” never to return to the status quo¹. Unfortunately, there is no one digital strategy, no starting line for all, and no instruction booklet to follow. But, most CIOs have one thing in common: they’re betting the future on multi-cloud.

We wanted to discover customers’ real-world drivers for multi-cloud adoption, and the challenges they encountered along the way. In an IDC White Paper sponsored by VMWare³, IDC describes the findings of their in-depth interviews with five enterprises about multi-cloud. Here’s an overview of what IDC found out.

The Route to Multi-Cloud is a Unique Experience

Enterprises are adding secondary cloud footprints for various reasons—some intentional, some not. Research findings reveal that cloud acquisition can be driven by vendor preferences and relationships rather than merit, and some companies, especially those with global entities, may have no choice but to use a regional cloud provider. In the SaaS world, multi-cloud plays a more significant role in directly impacting revenue opportunities. For example, a SaaS provider reported that some customers compete with a particular cloud provider and may refuse to conduct business across that cloud. Regardless of how they migrate, there’s common agreement that multi-cloud challenges exist.

Multi-Cloud User Insights

In interviewing these enterprises, some common themes appeared, giving way to an opportunity for organizations to learn from other enterprise cloud migration journeys. Here is a sampling of five of the many considerations uncovered in the report:

• Management capabilities across multiple clouds continue to challenge most organizations, and while a unified cross-cloud platform is the ideal, customers find these platforms are still maturing, making it difficult to displace existing tools.

• On-prem data centers are alive and well and customers continue to innovate on-prem infrastructure through investments in private cloud automation and self-service.

• Customers reported that migrating some legacy virtual machines (VMs) to native cloud was nearly impossible, requiring huge amounts of rearchitecting that would consume impractical amounts of time and money.

• Containers have a very different deployment profile than VMs, and customers had varying footprint patterns. But the overall thrust of new development was executed on cloud native containers.

• Containers are viewed as more portable than VMs, and container migrations are mostly one-way events (toward cloud) and require significant planning. Some customers interviewed tried but could not execute quickly or migrate containers between clouds on a whim.

To learn additional considerations for multi-cloud adoption and how various enterprises approached it differently, download the full IDC paper.

---