Multicloud pushed top vendors to broaden target customer profile

Dive Brief:

When choosing a multicloud, achieving a "truly abstracted infrastructure," free of patches and updates, is just about as important as avoiding vendor lock-in, according to a Turbonomic survey of more than 800 IT professionals across industries.
Around 50% of respondents said Amazon Web Services provided the best solution for IoT, developer tools and data services and around 30% said they believe Microsoft offers the best solutions. AWS is used by 55% of multicloud-using companies, compared to Microsoft's 52% and Google's 22%.
Using application services like artificial intelligence and big data analytics is the primary motivator for mobility in cloud workloads. The majority of respondents, 83%, say workloads will move freely across clouds.

Dive Insight:

Deploying a multicloud strategy eases the tensions of migrations while addressing gaps in services among vendors, though vendors once targeted specific customers.

Amazon and Google wanted technologists to use their clouds to create and manage their infrastructure whereas Microsoft and IBM wanted the "solution buyers" that wanted a managed service like Office 365, said Joel Horwitz, senior VP of strategic marketing at WANdisco, in an email to CIO Dive.

Now the rise in additional services and solutions gives each cloud an edge, making multicloud a more attractive option for the customer that wants it all. To stay relevant, cloud vendors have to meet the needs of customers outside their original customer profiles.

The multicloud is the next step for adoption for almost all organizations, but less than half have a multicloud management strategy, according to IBM. The strategies are stronger with applications but less so with handling data. "Applications working with large data sets should be located near their data to improve performance and efficiency," said Horwitz.

But data management that's "in motion," or migrating from a data center to a cloud, is a challenging task. An insufficient migration could result in lost data, clashing applications, service outages or data duplication which would lead to a spike in computing costs.

Complexity of managing a multi or hybrid cloud environment is the predominant challenge for 57% of respondents, followed by cultural changes and skills gaps as the next top barriers, according to the report.