John M. Clark, a cross-domain solution architect for Microsoft, says only large organizations can effectively adopt multi-cloud. The reasons is a lack of leverage to make the most of cost benefits in smaller businesses. “Attempting to play vendors off against each other for advantaged pricing usually doesn’t yield anticipated saving because of current state IT procurement processes. This only works if you are an enormous cloud consumer like Netflix as pricing is fixed based on features, and most companies have insufficient leverage.” Smaller organizations would possibly lose money through a multi-cloud approach as additional IT personnel would be needed. In the blog, Clark discusses several problems with multi-cloud:
“There is no simple migrate capability, especially for Paas and Saas, between clouds, so once workloads have landed then they tend to stay put, and the cost of re-factorization can be high For most workloads the pain, risk and cost of moving between clouds far outweighs the ongoing marginal cost benefits once the workload has been migrated. Attempting to play vendors off against each other for advantaged pricing usually doesn’t yield anticipated saving because of current state IT procurement processes. This only works if you are an enormous cloud consumer like Netflix as pricing is fixed based on features, and most companies have insufficient leverage. The concern for “Vendor lock-in” should be compared to the either direct or indirect cost of lock-in from an outsourcer or SI (a lock in of sorts). In many cases, it may cost less to refactor applications over time to run natively in the cloud compared to transitioning large portions of outsourcing contracts to support applications back on-premises or into IaaS. This starts to unveil the real cost of “technical debt””
Insanity of third-parties
Clark is not entirely dismissive of multi-cloud and says there are some reasons to adopt the solution. Among them would be to avoid “vendor lock-in”. However, he was quick to critique third-party management products, calling the use of such tools as bordering on “insanity”.
