When adopting multiple clouds, there needs to be a clearly defined purpose for each one. There doesn’t necessarily have to be separate purposes for each cloud environment (although this tends to work better in practice). An application or project may benefit from having multiple environments with different vendors. There really just needs to be clear objectives of how each cloud deployment is going to benefit the mission critical tasks that are assigned.

Data migration between clouds also needs to be taken into consideration and planned carefully. The migration can be a complicated process. Best practices include carefully reading and practicing the recommendations from vendor documentation. You should also verify that data can be moved between clouds by transferring test data.

So, multicloud definitely sounds like the way to go. What could go wrong? Well, quite a few things.

Training and certifying employees for only one cloud indisputably carries significant costs and time investment. It takes months and years for administrators and developers to master the possibilities of one cloud. Overhead will be multiplied when additional clouds are added. If just the basics are covered it can result in a real shallow knowledge of individual clouds with many of the features and benefits of each not being utilized.

The benefit of avoiding vendor lock-in mentioned earlier is possible under very specific circumstances. Those circumstances are usually when a specific cloud is being used for a specific workload. However, in many cases a multicloud strategy is going to end up costing a company more. This is because workloads extended across multiple clouds often result in multiple problems. Some of the technical problems include trying to configure each cloud’s implementation of container technology and failures in point of delivery systems. Security also needs to be addressed for each component of the environment and each vendor. More vendor support for maintaining data security is already a top concern for IT departments. Adding another vendor magnifies the lack of vendor support problem.

The decision to move to a multicloud environment is one that needs extra careful consideration. It should only be considered if it results in optimization of applications and adds value to the organization.