There’s no secret that over the past five years especially, the major (“tier 1”) cloud infrastructure players—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—have been snatching up smaller specialty providers, particularly cloud migration and security services.
While this acquisition strategy immediately aims to strengthen and expand the provider’s direct and tangential cloud infrastructure offerings, the long-term goal is customer attraction and retention.
In consolidating cloud infrastructure and related services, cloud vendors are targeting a basic human desire that often bleeds over into business decisions: convenience.
The play is transparent; the marketing is already in your psyche. People don’t like doing more than they have to, whenever possible. So, why not apply that tick to the cloud infrastructure experience? Why not use a provider where everything is already in one place?
Truthfully, the move toward cloud consolidation is a step in the opposite direction from where we should be going. The future lies in a multi-cloud approach, not a consolidated one.
Multi-cloud approaches offer both businesses and their customers several advantages over consolidated infrastructure.
Aside from the standard reasoning, I’d argue that there’s additional economic health in taking a multi-cloud approach. Competition naturally drives innovation, stabilizes costs and encourages improvement. Where one provider may falter, three others might specialize. If the majority of businesses consolidate their cloud resources with a single provider, though, the likelihood increases of services gradually worsening with no alternatives toward which to turn.
Multi-cloud takes planning and coordination to properly implement, and careful monitoring to maintain. An additional tool or two, such as a cloud management platform or cloud integration solution (which, truthfully, many businesses are likely already utilizing), may be needed.
But, the benefits far exceed the challenges. After all—to call upon Ken Jenkins’ iconic chief of medicine, Bob Kelso—nothing worth having comes easy.
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