On the Multi-Cloud Future

Do you run multiple operating systems? It's not uncommon for the answer to that question to be yes. You may run Linux on a laptop and Android on a phone, for example. In the same fashion, many experts surveying the cloud computing scene predict that the growing trend toward hybrid cloud deployments will make it extremely popular for enterprises to run many cloud platforms and tools concurrently.

There is some new data flowing in on this front, and some of it shows that enterprises may be ignoring this important trend. New research from VMTurbo (with participation from Verizon) shows that 57% of organizations have no multi-cloud strategy at all, where as 35% do not have a private cloud strategy and 28% don't have one for a public cloud solution.

If you think about those numbers, they show that many organizations are displaying tunnel vision when it comes to diversifying their cloud deployments.

The VMTurbo survey also revealed that organizations are not doing well at estimating total cost of ownership when deploying cloud platforms and tools.

According to VMTurbo:

"Analysts and experts predict that the end state of the current IT evolution is an architecture called hybrid cloud, whereby an organization delivers application services out of multiple virtualized, private cloud, and public cloud availability zones and actively ports workloads between these zones for reasons including cost, performance, and availability. Despite this projection, few, if any organizations have achieved this end state."

Of course, there are some organizations that are focusing directly on the trend toward usage of multiple cloud platforms and tools within one enterprise. For example, we've reported on Mesosphere, which offers a “data center operating system” (DCOS) built on the open source Apache Mesos project, and has announced lots of recent funding.

When we interviewed Mesosphere's Ben Hindman, he noted:

"The number of machines that most enterprise are working with is growing, and so is the variety of services and frameworks they’re trying to run...Higher utilization is a key advantage of a datacenter operating system. If you’re in the cloud, you might be buying 8 core machines but only using 2 cores. Your cloud provider is really the one benefiting from virtualized resources, not you! The datacenter operating system enables you to more fully utilize your machines by automating the placement of your applications across your machines, using as many resources as it can per machine...Humans are notoriously bad at figuring out how many resources they need and this will ultimately be completely handled via software."

 You can find out much more about multi-cloud strategies via VMTurbo's report.