Dive Brief:

• Nimble Storage announced Monday a new cloud storage service designed to help enterprises use multi-cloud environments and avoid cloud vendor lock-in.

• The new offering, Nimble Cloud Volumes, will allow companies to jump effortlessly between cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

• The new service targets core business applications, which tend to have more precise storage requirements than cloud-native apps, according to Nimble’s announcment. The service is in beta, and is expected in preview later this quarter.

Dive Insight:

As multi-cloud environments become the norm for many businesses, they will need the ability to move easily between clouds. RightScale’s 2017 State of the Cloud survey, released earlier this month, found 85% of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy, with some companies reporting using an average of eight clouds.

A multi-cloud strategy can offer a number of benefits, such as redundancy and disaster recovery. But some experts say vendor lock-in is actually a good thing, as it can mean better discounts and no hiccups in moving between cloud services providers.

Nimble hopes their new storage service will make it easy for customers to move to the multi-cloud environments they prefer, charging customers only for the changed data.