OK, But Is Multicloud Really Doable?

Multicloud is hard to do. Let’s be clear about that. The different platforms do not interoperate, and making that happen takes a lot — and we mean a lot — of work.

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

That was the word last year from Tony Safoian, CEO and president of SADA Systems. SADA is a Google Cloud-only managed service provider; it used to specialize in Microsoft, too. But now, for various reasons, SADA only provisions Google Cloud.

Duan Van Der Westhuizen, senior vice president of public cloud at global MSP Ensono, agreed.

“I used to believe multicloud was the next wave,” he said at the inaugural Channel Partners Cloud Roundtable in November 2021. Ultimately, though, “it’s too complicated,” he said.

To echo Safoian, channel partners can offer multicloud solutions. You just need to be trained, skilled and knowledgeable — and willing to go to the required lengths to make it work.

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