IT leaders agree the need for 'cloud-of-clouds'

That was the message from a roundtable Computing ran this week with Sumo Logic, dicussing whether the promise of multicloud matches up with its reality.

Using a single cloud vendor is attractive; keeping all of your systems in one place lowers complexity and raises visibility. But increasingly, our research shows that IT leaders are just as if not more interested in best-of-breed software and competitive pricing - even if it means signing on with a different cloud vendor to do it.

Earlier this year, we found that about a quarter of UK IT leaders have an official multicloud strategy, and nearly a third expect to be using more cloud providers within the next two years.

About half of our roundtable attendees, from both public and private sectors, were already using multiple cloud vendors, often for resilience, while others were interested. Notably, not all not everyone was using the Big Three (AWS, Azure and Google): smaller vendors with niche propositions were also mentioned. That said, the combination of Azure and AWS was still the most popular choice.

All roundtable attendees, both those who were using multicloud setups and those who were interested, agreed that a management layer for visibility and control - a 'cloud-of-clouds' - would boost the uptake of multicloud.

A layer like this, also known as unified cloud management, could help to cut complexity, boost innovation and save costs; and while tools do exist, they aren't yet widespread. Recent Computing research shows that fewer than 20% of UK organisations are using a similar solution - despite nearly 40% of UK IT leaders agreeing that cloud complexity is slowing innovation, and almost half saying that tools from different vendors are too siloed at their company.

Cloud vendors will have to become more open as multicloud evolves and spreads, one delegate said in closing: "It will become a new standard."