Multicloud Complexity to Multicloud Coherency

CCS Insight's James Sanders explores how to transform multicloud complexity into multicloud coherency with VMware's Amanda Blevins and Richard Munro, joined by Clive Howard, associate analyst with CCS Insight.

Show Notes

In this episode of the CCS Insight podcast, James Sanders, Principal Analyst of Cloud and Infrastructure at CCS Insight, is joined by VMware's Amanda Blevins, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Americas, and Richard Munro from the Office of the CTO for Strategy and Operations. Clive Howard, CTO for Huozhi and associate analyst at CCS Insight, also joined the discussion.

Multicloud deployments have become increasingly common in the past few years, with our Senior Leadership IT Investment Survey, 2022 finding that three-quarters of enterprises are using more than one cloud provider, up from 55% in our 2021 survey. Whether this be an intentional move or the product of acquisitions, mergers or trials, organizations can experience challenges in managing and securing their workloads correctly.

The discussion unpacks the main challenges that organizations face in supporting a multicloud architecture, touching on problems with training and hiring talent for specific technology services and business plans. The experts also highlight the correct organizational and operational approaches to delivering a multicloud strategy and how it can be implemented successfully, reviewing existing cloud services and providing internal customers with flexibility while maintaining control.

The podcast offers strategic guidance for a range of difficulties faced in a multicloud environment, including:

• Combining the benefits of a single multicloud service offering with those of individual proprietary cloud services
• Exercising spending control through areas like cloud financial operations and compliance with security, quotas and business policies
• Reducing complexity in multicloud environments by determining if a best-of-breed service is necessary to solve business challenges.

Creators & Guests

Host

James Sanders

Principal Analyst, Cloud and Infrastructure at CCS Insight

Guest

Amanda Blevins

VP and CTO, Americas at VMware

Guest

Clive Howard

CTO at Huozhi and Associate Analyst at CCS Insight

Guest

Richard Munro

Director, Strategy, Office of the CTO at VMware

What is The CCS Insight Podcast?

Insightful audio from the global tech advisory firm.

James Sanders:
Welcome to the CCS Insight podcast. My name is James Sanders and I serve as the Principal Analyst for Cloud and Infrastructure here at CCS Insight, and I'm your host for today's discussion on the journey from multicloud complexity to multicloud coherency.
Joining me today from VMware are Amanda Blevins, Vice President and CTO for the Americas, and Richard Munro from the Office of the CTO for Strategy and Operations. I'm also joined by Clive Howard, CTO at Huozhi, a provider of a humanitarian fintech platform. Clive is also an associate analyst with CCS Insight.
Hello and welcome to you all for what I expect will be a lively and informative discussion.
Amanda Blevins:
Hello.
Richard Munro:
Hello.
Clive Howard:
Hi, James.
James Sanders:
Great. Just to level set on how widely multicloud architectures have been adopted, three quarters of enterprises in CCS Insight's 2022 Senior Leadership IT Investment Survey are using more than one cloud provider, compared with only 55% one year ago. And with that, we're here to talk about what are the key benefits and drivers from multicloud environments. I'll kick it off to you, Amanda.
Amanda Blevins:
Thank you and thanks for having us on the podcast. I think there's two sets of drivers for multicloud. The first set is the more challenging one, where organizations or agencies accidentally found themselves running in multiple clouds or maybe started a POC that quickly turned into production and found themselves in multiple clouds. And we also include private and edge in our cloud definition. So if somebody is, you know, using on-prem and edge and AWS and Azure and those are four different clouds that they have to manage and secure and run workloads in properly. And so this is sometimes created unintentionally through acquisitions or trials or POCs and things like I mentioned.
The other driver that I think folks are trying to turn to, to run workloads in multiple clouds, is understanding where does my business generate revenue, what applications and data are necessary for that and what technologies do those applications and data need to be able to be successful currently, to be able to grow in the future, to break through to new markets and things like that. So it's a much more structured approach to leveraging technology by aligning it to business revenue or if you're an agency or, you know, a federal entity, to a mission.
James Sanders:
Richard, how does your experience compare?
Richard Munro:
Yeah, it completely marries that. I mean, we absolutely work with organizations who are really looking at the technology landscape we have today and effectively trying to weaponize that tech. So they're saying, I want to be able to use a best-of-breed capability from anywhere that gives me that competitive advantage I need. And, you know, with cloud services and cloud-native applications, the real benefits are that velocity to get things done.
However, it's also true that for many organizations, they set out with this idea that they were going to transform into a single cloud. But as Amanda was describing, there are so many reasons why everyone just ends up in the same space of being in this multicloud state. Just as some statistic examples, 42% of organizations have concerns about US ownership of cloud companies. That's a big, big number, that's nearly half the customer base. 70% believe the risk of compromising localized regulations are an increasing threat to their business plans. You know, the geopolitical spectrum is pretty complex right now.
So when you add to those the people that are acquiring companies, you know, there's so many ways that no matter what your original objectives, you will end up in a multicloud state. And certainly those that set out to do it and set out to recognize that fact, well, they're the ones that are going to be first to carry the competitive advantage.
James Sanders:
So, Clive, as a practitioner, how does this description really compare with the reality that you face day to day?
Clive Howard:
Well, I would agree with what's been said. I think from a practitioner's standpoint or through a developer lens, if you like, which is, I guess what I represent through both my roles. There's also the fact that, you know, applications and development teams may require certain services that are perhaps only present on a particular cloud or perhaps are considered better on a particular cloud, so that naturally lends toward using different clouds where needed, and then you end up with a multicloud environment.
I think the other thing is that you have teams, especially in large organizations, that are there for particular technologies. You know, we often see a Java team and then a Microsoft platform team. Those teams may naturally gravitate toward different cloud platforms because of the technology choices that they in the organization have already made. So, again, you can end up in a multicloud situation.
So I think, you know, from a developer perspective, there are a number of reasons why — especially in a large organization with a lot of development capability, a lot of different teams, a lot of legacy and a lot of skills built up over many years — why you might end up looking at different clouds for different benefits and to suit different groups.
James Sanders:
That's a really fantastic pivot to the next question, which is, you know, what are the main challenges that organizations face in supporting these multicloud environments? We've already talked about why we get to this destination, but on the ground, when you're having to deal with these different types of technologies that you have to put together into one unified system, what are the challenges? How does this actually work day to day?
Richard Munro:
Obviously these are technologies and there's going to be a lot of technical complexity with making changes, but, you know what? I think personally the biggest challenges are actually non-technical challenges. And of those the biggest challenges that I see people have basically all stem from resisting this change to accept that you're in a multicloud state and being determined to take advantage of it.
And that could be resisting it within IT. You know, IT is a valuable, valuable resource and it has a finite set of units that it can expend in effort, right. Now you can expend all of that valuable effort to try and enforce a single-cloud model. But as we've already discussed, it's highly unlikely to work — I've not seen it work. And it's preventing you using those resources to take the necessary steps to create a foundation where you can take advantage of multicloud.
But the other resistance that I see is failing to make your ability to support multicloud — once you do embrace it — your ability to support it and to support it well, failing to make that easily available to internal customers, because doing this right means giving those internal customers the flexibility and a degree of autonomy to do what they need to do to drive the business.
You want to deploy those apps and services? Go right ahead. And the technical org is not necessarily used to doing that. It's not a model that they've necessarily delivered in the past. "As a service" remains a hot topic, and I would argue that it's nowhere hotter than providing internal services to your internal customers.
Amanda Blevins:
And to add to what Richard said, you know, obviously the reason the purpose for IT and our applications in our data is to make the business successful in the various lines of business successful. So of course, we need to be able to provide the right technology, security and visibility and observability to those teams so they can do their work with the least amount of friction possible.
You know, one of the biggest issues that we find is when workloads are deployed in multiple clouds, generally that represents a small fraction of the workload number in total. So say there are 100 workloads that this company has — obviously, some have more, some have less, but a hundred so I can do easy math on the fly. Generally, only 10% of those workloads are running in public cloud, even if the organization, or especially if the organization had a project for the last few years or longer to migrate a significant portion of those workloads, generally 80%, to the public cloud.
And so there are a lot of things that are limiting these companies, large and small across the globe and different industries. And it's because running one or two applications in a cloud environment with the different types of architecture that must be put in place to support that is a far different than running a large estate of applications and analyzing data in a cloud environment for a number of reasons.
And so, you know, as a technologist, I can identify with the statement I'm about to make quite well. Technologists, we love new tech. We want to go out there and try new things and the latest languages and latest services and see what we can build with it. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we're making the right choice.
So there does need to be some sort of governance and oversight and architectural board to make sure that the services and other things that, you know, the technology teams are using to create and run these applications and manage this data and find insights to this data is not just because, as technologists, we think it's cool, but also because it makes the most business and, you know, architectural sense.
So regardless of when an organization's started or how many workloads they have or other things, as soon as there's multiple platforms being leveraged to run an application and to analyse data, you know, that's two times, three times, four times the amount of tools, the amount of people that are necessary to be able to support and run those environments at scale and we just don't have those number of folks and IT available to us. There isn't even, you know, the talent and the skills worldwide to be able to do that for the number of organizations that are trying.
So using something like multicloud services to be able to support and run workloads and multiple clouds is very important because then it removes the need for two times, three times, four times the amount of tools and teams will accomplish it. It means that you're using the same solution to be able to provide the same capabilities across multiple environments.
Clive Howard:
So just building on what's been said and just to sort of emphasize what Richard said and then what sort of Amanda articulated in a bit more detail. But cloud is hard, right? One cloud is hard. There is an enormous breadth and depth of capability, especially in the public clouds. And you only need to do a little research to really start to get a quick sense of just how challenging it is to even on-ramp into a single cloud.
And so when you multiply that by multiple clouds, you have an enormous challenge not just in the services and the products and even some of the technical aspects of running workloads, but just cost, you know, how much is all of this costing me? And cost in the cloud can be quite a complicated issue in itself.
And then you have other issues such as, you know, where are things running, what is running, how much resource am I using? And that can be across different geographies if you're running in multiple regions, that can be difficult to get to get a picture of. So even if you take out the idea of trying to run a single platform from a technology perspective to build on, you really want tools that can help you to see across all of these clouds from these various other perspectives so you can get a sense of what does my estate look like from the perspective of cost, from the perspective of where is my usage, where are my services, where are my workloads. And if there are tools that can help with that, then I think that's going to be of enormous benefit to the majority of businesses.
James Sanders:
It's interesting that you bring up, Clive, the need to really be planful about these types of technology deployments, and Amanda, you mentioned that you know as a technologist you love technology and from a consumer standpoint, I think we've all either seen or experienced first-hand the idea of, you know, going out and lining up in front of a store to wait for a new gadget to be released, but enterprises don't really do that. You can't really be the day one adopter necessarily, and I'd be surprised if you can find a store to line up outside of in order to get onto a cloud service.
How does an organization best combine the benefits of a single multicloud services offering that spans both private and public clouds, with those of individual proprietary cloud capabilities? Clive, let's start with you.
Clive Howard:
Yeah, I think it's a really good question because I think that, you know, there is value to having a single platform and being able to move your workload around different clouds. And certainly, I think we'll come on to talking about, you know, areas where, for example, there's regulatory issues that kind of, you know, require that.
But equally, I think the value of a cloud is typically in its proprietary capabilities. You know, why would I choose Azure over AWS, for example? Probably because Azure has got something that AWS doesn't have or does something in a way the AWS doesn't do it. So you're absolutely right — how do I get the benefit of a single platform but also get the benefit and the value of being on these different clouds?
And I think, you know, it's going to be a different answer for different organizations, but I think basically, ramping into cloud is challenging and a single platform can help you to do that, can accelerate that time to actually get into the cloud and to start to get workloads running in public clouds and private clouds, moving around and so on, whatever your requirement is.
And then that gives you a foundation from which you can then start to build into the proprietary services. So I think it shortens the time that it takes to get from basically being not in the cloud to getting into the cloud and then being able to embrace the services and releasing much more of the value that you're going to get from being in each cloud. So I think you can certainly use both. As I say, I think one is definitely an accelerator to the other.
Richard Munro:
I think Clive's spot on here and I think this gets really to the root of a huge amount of misunderstanding about what multicloud is and what this role of cross-cloud services can do for you. So cross-cloud services do bring consistency, but I often hear that it's kind of a lowest common denominator approach, and actually that's not quite getting what cross-cloud services can do for you.
So they do bring cloud agnostic features, right? So, if you want to use like an Amazon RDS database or something, you're going to go into that console. But if you want to set up access controls to a new application team across various distributions and resources that are in different clouds, some on-prem, some in AWS, some in Azure, whatever, then you don't want to have to do that three times and hope you've got it right and hope you've got consistency.
You want a tool that's going to give you that consistent operational ability to do that. So, whilst there are cloud agnostic features that you will directly use, the point about cross-cloud services is that they also free you to use those proprietary services where you want or need to. How? Because you have the controls in place to facilitate and manage that.
And this is exactly why so many businesses who, maybe last year or the year before, insisted that they would be single cloud, their pace of transformation was actually really slow and problematic. And what they found out was that the way to accelerate their ability to specifically use those proprietary services they really needed to deliver value wasn't to say "Hey, I'm going to throw everything in there", right? It just did not work. Instead, it was to embrace multicloud and this concepts across cloud services and as a result, to make the transformation a lot simpler and a lot cheaper and to enable them to use those proprietary services without all the crazy risk and threat and silos.
Amanda Blevins:
Yeah, I agree with everything that's been said so far and I'll dive down a little deeper and present a challenge to everyone that's listening to this podcast or might be talking about it with their colleagues and folks in the industry as well.
We've mentioned a couple of times already, you know organizations and developers and technologists want flexibility and choice to be able to choose best-in-breed services, and I think everybody has their own opinion about how that affects their technology landscape for their organization. If a company chooses too many best-of-breed services, the complexity that goes into making all those things work together, versus buying more of a platform and a solution. And, you know, I think about the landscape of companies across various industries that are doing things and, you know, obviously there's companies like Netflix that are, you know, pushing the boundaries of technology every day based on the scale that they have to perform and the amount of users that they service. And then, you know, there's enterprise companies that are not having to solve those problems, but they're solving other problems in the way that they deliver their services to their if they're B2B or B2C or whatever their business model is.
And so I think by my question to folks would be, when you say best-in-breed, what is it specifically that you need that is not available in a different cloud service? And so how can we limit the amount of cloud services, especially across multiple clouds, that we actually need to consume?
So, you know, database services are available in every public cloud provider, or do I go with a multicloud service like Snowflake where I can get the same database services across? You know, what do I get out of RDS that I don't get a snowflake that I really need to make a business differentiation in my company? And so the same goes for other levels of services, whether they're end user, other things in the application, you know, multicloud service area, security and infrastructure.
So a great example would be: I'm using Kubernetes and I'm running EKS, AKS, Tanzu, Kubernetes grid and Anthos and OpenShift, all these different platforms. And so to be able to manage and secure and control Kubernetes across this real estate, well, I can use, you know, a solution, a multicloud service to do that because I'm not really use losing any capabilities for my business needs if I can offer Kubernetes wherever I should be.
Now, if I have a small data science team that needs to do machine learning on their way to artificial intelligence and they determine that best-of-breed is available on Google Cloud platform and some of their, you know, data analytics services, then I probably would not institute a multicloud service to be able to accomplish that because I just have a small set of people that have a specific problem that can be solved by this best-of-breed service.
Now, if it was something that needed to happen at scale, then maybe would go a different route. So, you know, just to summarize there, you know, obviously we all like to use the best things, and I'm well-known for having lots of resiliency in all of my designs for others, professional, personal.
But I would challenge folks to see how else can you reduce complexity in your environment by determining, do I always need best-of-breed or do I need these particular services to be able to solve my business challenges?
James Sanders:
That's a really good point on that. And I think the idea of best-in-breed and best-in-class services versus, you know, how would you actually do this at scale in a way that is it a proper multicloud deployment versus just a bunch of different clouds in parallel that don't really talk to each other?
And so I'm curious, what's the right organizational and operational approach to delivering a multicloud strategy for an enterprise? What can an organization do to implement it successfully? And I'll throw back to you for that.
Amanda Blevins:
Yeah, I think there's a couple of major decisions organizations need to make. I think in the past, you know, five, seven years ago, three years ago, when folks had the cloud-first mentality and all my workloads are moving and then they found that it didn't provide the ROI, the KPIs or the agility that they were looking for. And now, you know, leaders are now re-evaluating like, what is my cloud strategy? So now I get to be intentional about it.
And so I think there's a couple of major things. One, there has to be the decision, do I want to run my own data centres? If I do, for whatever reason — security, compliance, the fact that it's less expensive if I do well than using public cloud services, whatever the reasons are — if I'm going to stick to that, whatever the percentage of applications and workloads that will be there, I need to modernize my data centres and have them perform as private clouds. So if I just stick with older technology, then the amount of time and care and feeding that my data centres require will not get me to the point where I need, you know, with agility.
And then, you know, if I decide, you know what, I'm not doing any private data centres, it's not important to my business or my organization, I will run all my workloads in public clouds. That's when you decide what is the speed in which I need to get out my data centres, there's a contract coming up, you know, do I have to do it in six months? Do I have three years? You know, what is my timeline? And that will also drive, you know, how you'll do this cloud migration. Will you refactor your applications, modernize them, use cloud services? Will you, you know, take a lift and shift approach? And then once it's all move, then you start to identify what should be refactored. And so all these different, you know, concepts and ideas means that you might need different talent.
But the thing that I would stress is that however you approach it, make sure that you're not creating two different teams, two different organizations, two silos or three silos or four silos if you have multiple clouds. Think about from the aspect of you have a cloud operations team and those are all your architects and engineers and operations folks, and then you have the platform engineering team. The platform engineering team are the ones that create the platform in which application owners and developers use to interact with their applications to be able to deploy them, you know, manage them already with all the security and everything already built in because of platform engineering team, the cloud ops team are working together to provide that hand-in-hand.
So it's a little bit of the evolution from Devsecops because some folks have determined that Devsecops has not worked out for them so they're looking for the next way to do this. And so, you know, helping your talent grow their skill sets to be able to align to what you're looking to accomplish, they don't need to know everything about public cloud, that's impossible. Nobody would ever know everything. But make sure that you're training your talent and hiring talent that can align specifically to your technology direction and the specific technology services that you think that you'll need because they'll have meaningful work to do and they'll want to stay and solve these complex problems.
James Sanders:
That's really good advice, especially for enterprises that have, I think, the level of staffing to build out the teams that you've described. And I'm curious, Clive, you know, you're the CTO of a social benefit organization. I don't know what the level of staffing of that group is, but how difficult would it be to implement that type of strategy in your organization?
Clive Howard:
Well, we are a very small organization. I mean, small organizations obviously have a slight benefit in this scenario, which is that, you know, we're not a tanker that needs turning, right? We are a small group that can move incredibly quickly and are quite nimble and we've we have people that are both good at that and want to do that. So some of the issues that, you know, that come up and have been raised, like, for example, the resistance, you know, we don't we don't run into resistance. We have people who are very keen to adopt new technologies, but not just for the sake of adopting new technologies, but to adopt them in order to realize the benefits and the value of doing so.
So I think, you know, some of it is relevant when you're a smaller organization. But some of it, you have the ability to shortcut it because we don't have a lot of people to have to alter and change and processes that have been in place for a long time and consist of lots of groups and teams who have a process. We often have a lot of automation already, for example, so changing those processes is not that difficult. So we have all of those benefits.
Where we kind of suffer, I think, as a smaller organization is where, you know, the public cloud, especially as I mentioned earlier, has enormous breadth and depth. That's the same if you're the largest enterprises or if you're the smallest little business. But as a small business, that breadth and depth is even more challenging because you can't put armies of people on to figuring out every service that you want to use to the nth degree, and you don't have operations teams that can go off and production-ready this whole thing and make sure all the right security is in place and so on and so forth. So it makes it very challenging from that perspective when you don't have a lot of resource to throw at what are quite complicated capabilities and can quite quickly become quite complex set ups from an architecture and development perspective.
So, you have to find ways, clever ways, to make sure that you're doing things properly because you can't just say, well, we're small, therefore let's not worry about security, especially for us. Security is incredibly important for us. So that's where often, for example, we've been very fortunate that, you know, sometimes partners will come in and help us in those certain key areas.
And partners are something that we haven't really sort of touched on, but I think, you know, partners often have that that depth of experience and skill that you don't have, and to be honest, you just can't invest in creating. And so they can come in sort of as a kind of shortcut to get you to the kind of state that you need to be in in order to feel happy about what you have running out there in whatever clouds it is you have it running in.
Richard Munro:
I feel Clive's just, you know, really nailed the key issues there. If you look at how our ability as an industry has evolved over the maturing years of cloud and cloud-native apps, the problems we're solving that are delivering that maturity, they're all problems we've solved before. Like heterogeneity, it's not servers, it's clouds and app frameworks. Getting consistent security across all the things that we have, making sure we're not on the front page because we had a bucket with elevated privileges of something. And the people in your organization already have a lot of those useful skills and experience — it's already there, it's in your organization. So our first focus is making sure that those are on board to your mission and that you're augmenting them with support for the new tech components they need to learn.
And two things there. One, cross-cloud services are actually fantastic for this because by definition they inherently link all the worlds, right? There's a familiarity and a consistency that they can leverage. But two, Clive quite rightly called out that the partner-and-provider ecosystem now is also very mature, so there's a lot of support that people can get. And when I say mission, you know, I think it's really twofold, you can kind of simplify it in terms of approach to twofold.
So assuming you are embracing that, this is going to be my reality and how do I maximize the benefit I get for the for the minimum effort? The first is a cloud operating model that enables you as a business to take advantage and do whatever is right for you. And we have solutions, cross-cloud solutions to kind of help you do that. It's very uncomfortable to say, "Hey, you go and do what you like". The reality is that you're setting up technical guardrails which let people deploy the apps and resources in different clouds, but always while ensuring that they're compliant with your security, your quotas, your business policies and so on.
And the second side is, Clive actually mentioned the importance earlier about FinOps, financial operations. People often feel that services we provide in this space is about cost identification, and I get it because that's a huge benefit. I mean, who doesn't want to avoid bill shocks and who doesn't want to save 20 plus percent or whatever? Everyone goes there and it's great it gets those early wins, but really, setting yourself up with the cloud operating model, bringing along those people who understand your business priorities. What you can do is provide full financial transparency for your digital go to market for any of your projects, for any of your lines of business, for any of your applications. I don't care where they're deployed. I don't care what solutions they're using.
This is why we're doing this, right. We're trying to accelerate our digital transformation. We're trying to get those benefits of becoming a more digital-based company and these cross-cloud services and this approach to multicloud, well, this is how we get spend control across all of that, but it's also how we get that really intelligent digital analysis that can ultimately realize our ability to drive business profitability. So embracing it and bringing the people along on a joint mission where they and your organization are transforming is the way to go.
James Sanders:
Thanks for that, Richard. And that brings us pretty neatly to the end here about, you know, multicloud is going to require new skills and there is a talent shortfall in the market. So I'm curious what organizations can do to address this challenge, and I'd like to hand that back to Amanda.
Amanda Blevins:
Yeah, you know, it's a true challenge whether you're a Fortune 10, a government agency, anywhere in between. Finding the folks that know public cloud services well is difficult: they demand high compensation, talent acquisition folks are always reaching out to them. So there might be a little bit of a concern around hiring folks like that and then training and retaining folks, you know, for those public cloud services that you will consume that you've decided to use.
And so I think that, you know, in my opinion, employees will stay at a place and remain in a company and be loyal to a company where they're doing meaningful work and they feel like they're making an impact in that industry or in the world and find out what else is important to them.
Because, you know, we've all learned technology up to this point. We've all figured it out, right. And we all have our specialties and things that we enjoy and that just is going to continue and grow as we continue to move workloads into various locations and public clouds and edge and private cloud. And so, technologists want to know that new technology, they want to learn it, and there has to be a meaning to go along with it.
So there's no easy magic wand that you can wave and all of a sudden you're fully staffed with all the folks that you need, with the skills that you need. It's going to take some time to grow that team and grow them in a way that folks want to be a part of it and that they're continuing to grow as a professional and learn those new skills. But definitely being transparent about the company goals and how this relates back to the success of the company will go a long way and in hiring those folks and retaining the ones that you have.
James Sanders:
So as we're coming to the end of our recording, I'm curious, and let's start with Richard. If I would ask you to summarize this into a 30 seconds elevator pitch, what's your top takeaway from the conversation we've had today?
Richard Munro:
The top takeaway is that everyone is going to be faced with this multicloud reality. And, you know, we have seen through every organization that the trick is to understand that and embrace it. The good news about doing that is that, yes, there's lots of complexity, but there are also these services that don't restrict your ability to achieve your ambitions, but they do facilitate you being able to transform your organization, your applications, your infrastructure and your people to make that journey a lot less painful and a lot less risky.
James Sanders:
And Amanda, what's your 30 seconds elevator pitch or takeaway?
Amanda Blevins:
Multicloud and using cloud services can absolutely bring the velocity and agility that organizations need to innovate and to be market leaders and to satisfy their missions and goals. And obviously we talked about, you know, Clive said one of my favourite sayings: cloud is hard. And in my opinion, multiple clouds is exponentially harder, especially two or three times as hard.
And so it's really weighing out where do I need that agility and velocity, what part of my organization do I need it in, what applications or data do I need it for, first. And then have that shape your cloud strategy but not have it define your cloud strategy. Keep those other applications and workloads in mind so you don't come to a point where you realize that even though the path you took was great for the first 10% of the applications, it's not the right path for the other 80 or 90% that you want to move.
James Sanders:
And Clive, I'll go to you last for what have you learned today?
Clive Howard:
I think that what I would say is that, you know, we've talked a lot about multicloud, obviously, and the challenges and the benefits and so on. But I think it's important to remember that cloud, one cloud or multiple clouds, is not the change. It's the facilitator of the change that organizations are trying to go through.
I think what people need to identify is what are they trying to achieve? Nobody has said to me that my job is to go and be in multiple clouds, right? My job is to create value for a business by creating something that that business then deploys and uses to generate value for them and for their customers, and multicloud can support me in doing that, right.
So I think, you know, it's key to understand what is it as a business you are trying to achieve, where do you see the value being, and then track back to, okay, where is it in various clouds, one cloud, multiple clouds, that can help me to deliver on that goal and not kind of get a little bit sort of side-tracked by just, you know, focussing on the technology like, if we're in multiple clouds, then we're doing a good thing. So, I would say, you know, be clear about the business goal, the business aim, the business value and then, how does multicloud support that?
James Sanders:
Well, Clive, thank you very much. And everyone, thank you very much for joining in today, it's been a great conversation. For all of you listening, tune in for our next episode.
Amanda Blevins:
Thank you for hosting, James. This was excellent.
Clive Howard:
Thank you, everyone.
Richard Munro:
Yeah, thank you very much, James.