Multi-cloud adoption has accelerated in the past few years as more and more enterprises turn to public cloud platforms to support new and changing ways of doing business.
According to a survey by Gartner, 81% of public cloud users say they are working with two or more providers and putting more of their operations into services like Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services1. Among the reasons for doing this are to increase agility, avoid or minimise vendor lock-in and to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions.
However, the benefits of multi-cloud are contingent on the network that connects the enterprise to the cloud environment. Within an enterprise, different departments may be using different clouds across different geographical locations. Workloads and data that are stored in one cloud may have to be moved to another and back again. To optimise the benefits of the multi-cloud environment, the network needs to have the same level of agility as the enterprise applications, the compute stack and data storage that it has to interoperate with.
Achieving this can be an uphill task. Enterprises need to be able to connect different cloud environments on a global scale. As they attempt to do this, they will realise that connecting directly to each cloud service provider is costly, and the environment will become increasingly difficult to manage as more data and services are moved into the multi-cloud environment.
The increase in complexity also adds to the cybersecurity challenge facing enterprises today. Lack of visibility makes it difficult to detect and track sophisticated attacks and opens the environment up to a wider range of security breaches, cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities.