How Do Companies View Their Multicloud Strategies?

Although multicloud computing has been around for years, many companies are still trying to figure out its best use cases, according to a recent poll.

The poll, taken during a recent ActualTech Media webinar, asked an interesting question of attendees: “If your multicloud strategy had a personality, which one best describes it?”

The answers were illuminating, with a significant plurality likening their strategy to “The Tinkerer - constantly evolving, still figuring out what works best.” Forty percent of poll-takers chose this description, which likely reflects the broader industry.

Multicloud computing, while well-established technologically, has significant costs and complexities associated with it, which makes it an undertaking that organizations wade into slowly.

The next most-common answer was “"The Budgeteer" - focused on chasing cost optimization above all else.” This makes sense, as every cloud provider has different cost structures and tiers of service. Mixing and matching costs with a company’s operations is a wise decision, since every business uses the cloud for different things, including storage, compute, backup, disaster recovery, and so on. 

It’s worth noting that this response lagged “The Tinkerer” significantly, coming in at just 17 percent.

Interestingly, the bottom three answers ended up in a tie, at 14 percent apiece. They included:

•   "The Strategist" - carefully planned, well-governed, and aligned with business goals
•   "The Skeptic" - reluctant to go all-in due to security or compliance concerns
•   “I don't know”

Although non-scientific, these results do reflect some general trends in IT. They show that multicloud, while offering big advantages, can be quite disruptive to operations, resulting in a lot of hesitation before fully embracing the model.