Adopting a
Multi-Cloud Strategy
Joey Jablonski
As organizations move beyond their initial cloud deployments and application
migrations, many are looking to diversify into a multi-cloud strategy to enable
teams to access specialized capabilities available from different providers. The
shift to multi-cloud adoption for supporting IaaS and PaaS capabilities is a critical milestone that an organization must evaluate, plan for and ensure they can
take on the additional operational burden and skill set requirements. Many
organizations have already adopted different cloud providers through the use
of SaaS offerings. This paper will focus on the organizational adoption of cloud
platforms supporting IaaS and PaaS, commonly used to migrate infrastructure
and applications from traditional data centers. The three most common players in this cloud platform space are AWS, Azure and Google.
Initial cloud deployments typically focused on leveraging a single cloud platform. This early simplicity allowed organizations to build up their operational
capabilities with a cloud-centric model, without the added strain of training
multiple sets of new skills across the enterprise. This single cloud approach
also made choosing third-party software much simpler, since there was a lack
of multi-cloud support in many early third-party products. Organizations also
used this single vendor approach to provide leverage in contract negotiations
to gain cost advantages for first-movers.
Once an organization has established its cloud presence and built an operational model around cloud based applications, it commonly looks to expand to
additional cloud platforms to diversify the capabilities available to its teams.
Some of the most common triggers to adding platforms are:
• Specialized application teams require a capability that is unique to one
cloud provider
• Security and governance posture is mature enough to support a second
provider
• The organization’s Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC) is clearly defined to
enable like-for-like functionality and protections across cloud platforms
76 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2016