Problems with Multicloud

Might we see the death of multicloud hype in 2022? If these MSPs’ observations are on point, that could be the case.

Indeed, multicloud deployments appear to have saved organizations rushing to the cloud during COVID-19. Different divisions within a global enterprise, for example, often stood up their own environments to suit their unique needs as the pandemic forced people to work from home. IT experts spent much of 2021 figuring out what the organization was paying for and whether the data were secure. Using different cloud providers contributed to the complexity. And it became clear that internal IT staff might lack the skills required to keep those different clouds running properly.

“I used to believe multicloud was the next wave,” Ensono’s van der Westhuizen said. Ultimately, though, “it’s too complicated,” he said.

SADA’s Safoian agreed.

“It’s very hard, operationally. … You have to be super sophisticated,” he said.

To that point, some channel partners might even “fake” being multicloud providers to appeal to potential clients, AllCloud’s Gil said. In other words, he said, it can be easy to spend “a dollar a year” with a certain cloud vendor and proclaim multicloud expertise. When asked if this is a common practice within the channel, Gil said no — some partners play games, he noted, but “the majority don’t.”

Another part of the problem with multicloud lies in interoperability. Data sets across platforms do not just sync into one data lake and magically work together, Gil said.

Safaoian concurred.

“You could run infrastructure on one and data on another … but it can’t be a mixed data lake or infrastructure. That requires lots of sophisticated engineering.”

Keep an eye on customers’ multicloud setups in 2022. They may need to trim down the number of vendors they use or turn to a skilled channel partner for help managing the different requirements.