Featuring:
Lee Sustar, Principal Analyst and Tracy Woo, Senior Analyst
Show Notes:
Over the past few years, more organizations have chosen to use multiple cloud platforms. In some cases, the multicloud approach is a strategic plan to leverage the right technology for the right use case. In other cases, multicloud just sort of … happens. Individual business units or application owners make independent decisions with no centralized approach, and before the organization knows it, they’ve dramatically increased their cloud complexity.
In this episode, Analysts Lee Sustar and Tracy Woo discuss the benefits of having a well-designed multicloud strategy in place and the risks of letting governance slip while complexity grows.
The episode starts by defining multicloud, as definitions and terminology can vary across industries and organizations. The analysts compare multicloud to similar terms like “hybrid cloud” and “distributed cloud,” highlighting which terms are marketing speak and which are accepted industry terms with specific meanings.
The episode also includes a review of some of the regulatory and compliance concerns around data privacy that are impacting cloud strategies, plus the role of local cloud providers vs. hyperscalers to address privacy concerns in specific regions. Sustar says these trends could lead to an increase in cloud nationalism, one of Forrester’s key cloud predictions for 2022.
From there, the discussion investigates the risk of “multicloud by accident.” Woo explains that in some organizations, the decision to adopt an additional cloud platform aims to tap into a specific service or comes as part of a broader resiliency strategy. But in other cases, organizations add complexity and cost without truly realizing they’re doing it. Sustar emphasizes that the often-overlooked piece to multicloud success is having a security and GRC framework that isn’t specific to any single cloud platform or provider.
The episode closes with Woo providing some clear recommendations about when multicloud is not the right answer for your organization (Hint: Each organization has to decide how much complexity is too much.)
