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As enterprises demands look set to continue maturing thisyear, they are better able to distinguish between cloud platforms and identifywhich ones work best for their applications.

Its no longer about moving to cloud, its aboutwhich cloud, said Andrew Cruise, Managing Director at Routed, Africas onlyvendor neutral cloud infrastructure provider.

Now that market penetration of cloud, particularlyinternationally, has hit a critical mass, we see enterprises are much moreconfident about moving workloads than before when it appeared they would be onthe bleeding edge. While there are still some concerns around uptime, performanceand security, these are largely being addressed without any need to reinventthe wheel.

Multi-cloud is already broadly being achieved throughSaaS applications like Salesforce.com and Office365, through utilising anenterprises own on-premise infrastructure, and via several other cloudplatforms.

True multi-cloud however, involves IaaS from multipleproviders across native hyperscale IaaS (or PaaS) as well as private cloud,both hosted and on-premise, explained Cruise.

In order to successfully implement multi-cloud, an enterprise would need to replace parts of their overall infrastructure estate, either by re-hosting workloads (lift and shift) into a hosted private cloud, or re-architecting applications in a cloud-native way to suit native hyperscale clouds. Secure connectivity, either through VPN, SD-WAN or private circuit, is also a must.

Not one single cloud can ever be the silver bullet tosolve all an enterprises problems.

Cloud only, hybrid cloud, or on-premise onlysolutions are already legacy and too restrictive. Utilising a hosted privatecloud for traditional applications as an initial lift-and-shift can make it easierto digitally transform by alleviating pressures on on-premise resources andallow them time to properly re-architect suitable applications in the nativehyperscale cloud.

While the benefits of multi-cloud are impossible tooverlook, enterprises need to think carefully about the best strategies formanaging the complexity of multi-cloud environments. It is not possible tomanage mult-icloud effectively on-demand, manually, without automation.

Similarly, human expertise will always be required, saidCruise.

Any kind of one-size-fits-all thinking is bound tofail. Further, workload migration between on-premise and cloud and betweencloud and cloud is non-trivial and the difficulties should not beunderestimated. Unless one standardises on a single platform across multipleclouds, for example, VMware ESXi (which is available on local VMware cloudproviders and on all the major hyperscalers too), the ideal of frictionlessmigration between clouds is a pipedream.

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Mastering the complexity of multi-cloud in 2020 - Intelligent CIO ME