Vendor diversity should be key element of any cloud strategy, warns Ray Bricknell

Putting all your applications in one cloud can leave your organisation exposed, warns Bricknell

Major organisations should host their applications and data in more than one vendor's cloud as part of their risk-management strategy because standardising on one provider's cloud could leave an organisation exposed to undue price rises - or even adverse consequences should the supplier run into difficulties.

That's the no-nonsense advice of Ray Bricknell, managing director of consultancy Behind Every Cloud.

Speaking recently on an expert panel during a Computing web seminar, ‘Cloud mix and match - getting the balance right', Bricknell warned of a number of potential issues that could arise.

"The concept of vendor diversity is very important in the private managed cloud world," Bricknell said.

"Historically, it would never have been possible to walk downstairs and find that your IT department has gone bust, or say that they're refusing to tell you how many virtual machines they're running."

According to Bricknell, both scenarios are possible when that IT department has effectively been outsourced to a third-party cloud provider, something he calls the "2E2 effect", referencing the now-defunct cloud vendor 2E2, which went bust in 2013 leaving £257 million owed to creditors.

It also took an entire data centre's worth of its customers' information down with it, who had to scramble to recover their systems and data.

"There's the 2E2 effect, where the vendor goes broke. The administrators in that case ended up sending notes to clients saying 'give us £10,000 now or your data goes away'.

"Then there was the AWS [Amazon Web Services] outage last week. In that case around 20 per cent of the US cloud environment went down due to a single point of failure," said Bricknell.

He also referenced the Office 365 service from Microsoft, which itself has had frequent problems, along with other products from the company, due to authentication issues.

"Email is probably the most critical application in most enterprises, and Office 365 is far from a stable beast. Can your business operate with email downtime?" he asked.