It’s a multicloud world, with organizations investing in private and public environments. A steady stream of new capabilities are showing the power of cloud computing as they spin up at the edge to manage the massive influx of data generated in real-time.

Now, more clouds are rolling in. There are telecom and sovereign clouds, and vertical industry clouds that provide support, applications and requirements specific to healthcare, finance, government, retail and even media. 

While this is great news for organizations looking to maximize the value of their cloud investment and meet critical business objectives, it complicates the multicloud landscape. The proliferation of very specialized clouds can create more silos if companies aren’t able to move data and apps freely between them.  

A robust multicloud strategy ensures that organizations benefit from the efficiencies of public clouds, like flexibility and scale and bring these on premises with the advantages of performance, control and security. 

Less is more … complexity

When building a strategy, some may say the obvious answer is a monolithic cloud approach – pick one platform with one provider, rely on their apps and small pool of partners. 

But this stunts innovation. Closed platforms are the proverbial walled garden in the cloud and developer ecosystem, decreasing integration across the ecosystem and leading to vendor lock-in.

While it may seem simple in the beginning, organizations miss out in the long run by limiting themselves to a proprietary set of services that impact their ability to easily access and adopt future industry innovations. 

Too often, organizations that do invest across multiple clouds and services are left to figure out the disparate pieces on their own. Workarounds take time and resources away from innovation and productivity. 

Two-thirds of organizations (66%) want to deal with fewer, more strategic digital infrastructure and cloud vendors, while 68% said avoiding vendor lock-was important, according to IDC.

Organizations want these clouds, apps, platforms and services to work together seamlessly. They want multicloud by design, not by default.

But they don’t necessarily want a single service provider – they want a simpler way to manage and orchestrate data and apps across multiple cloud environments.

While the nirvana state is to get a singular view, a more realistic goal may be to reduce the number of unique siloed tools for cloud management and orchestration to enhance value.

More open, less ego

We see the solution to multicloud complexity differently: Break down silos and build an open ecosystem that thrives on a wide range of partnerships, collaboration and innovation. 

Multicloud is not just a random collection of public clouds, or even those clouds’ loose connections to private clouds. Multicloud is about accessing an ever-expanding set of innovations across clouds and acknowledging that you need the capabilities of the entire ecosystem to deliver modern IT.

That’s where open ecosystems come in. They allow for interoperability and deeper integration across solutions and services – providing greater access to innovation from a variety of providers.

This way, the technology not only works, but it also works in the ways organizations really need it to. It has to if we want to unleash data-driven breakthroughs through AI and automation powered by cloud computing.  

No single company or innovator will deliver on the promise of technology. Nor should they. That’s what makes the technology industry so incredibly vibrant – relentless innovation that pushes the boundaries of possibilities to solve the world’s greatest challenges.