Achieving Cloud Neutrality with a Multicloud Approach

By: Ignacio M. Llorente

When considering a move to the cloud, it might be tempting to pick a single provider. But digital transformation services aren’t one-size-fits-all. In fact, there are many reasons why digital transformation requires organizations to take a cloud neutrality approach and make use of cloud services from multiple providers and avoid being locked into a single provider. Increased cost saving and price flexibility, risk mitigation, enhanced security and service availability, unlimited scalability, better agility, and the promise of each provider’s best solutions are all too great to ignore.

See also: Solving the Challenges of Multicloud Cost Management

The days of single public cloud deployments are gone. According to Gartner, by 2026, more than 90% of enterprises will extend their capabilities to multi-cloud environments, up from 76% in 2020. The use of multiple clouds is by far the most common pattern among enterprises, with 89% (73% hybrid cloud, 14% multiple public cloud and 2% multiple private cloud) adopting this strategy in Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report.

The truth is that managing and supporting multi-cloud is not an easy task. In an ideal world, application workloads — whatever their heritage — should be able to move seamlessly between (or be shared among) cloud service providers and to be deployed wherever the optimal combination of performance, functionality, cost, security, compliance, availability, and resilience is to be found — while avoiding the dreaded ‘vendor lock-in’.

These are some key principles for making multi-cloud adoption a success:

1. Avoid Multi-Cloud through Hyperscalers

Although big cloud providers have spent years ignoring multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, now they are making their first steps towards embracing them. Hyperscalers are now starting to offer new platforms (e.g. AWS ECS Anywhere, Google Anthos) that work on other providers, and pre-configured hybrid cloud appliances (e.g. AWS Outpost, Microsoft’s Azure Stack) that promise to bring the power of the public cloud to the private cloud. While they offer the simplicity of using the same interfaces both on the public cloud and on a private data center, these proprietary solutions do not avoid the pitfalls of single-vendor reliance and can be very expensive in the long run.

2. Avoid Proprietary-Source Solutions

The evolution of the modern cloud is leading to the creation of highly complex systems, often based on proprietary orchestration solutions by major vendors (e.g. Nutanix, VMware), that expand private clouds with resources from cloud providers. These proprietary-source solutions have predatory pricing and licensing models, are complex and expensive to deploy and maintain, and usually require the user to manually migrate or rebuild workloads. When the solution combines hardware and software, the problem is exacerbated and vendor lock-in is inevitable.

A recent example that highlights this trend is VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom, which has resulted in widespread concern due to substantial changes in pricing and licensing structures, further intensifying the challenges of vendor lock-in.

3. Adopt True Multi-Cloud

Multi-cloud is not only about achieving interoperability, defined as the ability to manage your workload across every cloud from a single pane of glass. A true multi-cloud solution should also bring portability, defined as the execution of your workloads with the same images and templates on any infrastructure and their mobility across clouds and on-premises infrastructure, enhanced security, defined as the use of dedicated, isolated resources with improved security, privacy, and control, and expanded service availability, defined as the execution of applications to meet the quality of service requirements.

4. Not All Workloads Are Heading to the Cloud

Although multi-cloud will become the norm, there’s still a place for the on-premise data center, at least in the near term, either as part of a hybrid cloud strategy or to host legacy applications that, for whatever reason, are not suitable for migration to the cloud. Some of the main reasons to keep using on-premises resources to host workloads include cost, control, security, and performance. Moreover, modern distributed cloud environmen…

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