Why Multi-Cloud is the Inevitable Winner

If Multi-Cloud is the Future, What’s Stopping You?

The future of your own cloud computing investments are intertwined with the business models of the vendors offering you solutions.

There are some both unintended and fully intended implementation consequences when those business models run into yours.

For example, both Amazon and Microsoft are creating incompatible walled gardens around their cloud offerings – this is true at the technology level, with no industry-wide independent standards across cloud providers, as well as at the business model level.

You’re either in the Microsoft camp or you’re in the Amazon camp with nothing but the barebones of low-level Internet standards connecting them, a lot of integration work needed on your part, and some serious financial implications if you’re not very careful about how you use multiple clouds.

How does this play out in reality?

Well, for example, with Cloud 1.0 solutions, you won’t find very many people trying to run their analytical processes in one cloud and their data storage in the other, at least not without a heavy financial price.

The technical challenges can be overcome with the right amount of resources and a lot of time, but the cloud vendor’s business models are built to lock your data into the whatever vendor you’ve chosen to store the data in that you’re going to analyze.

Both vendors, actually all of the Cloud 1.0 providers do their best to make sure you “pay the toll” for your using your own data by imposing egress fees for any data that you want to take out of their respective walled gardens.

In fact, we’ve heard from customers who are current users of Cloud 1.0 technology, that they reserve at least $1 million USD a year in their budget to be able to deal with the unpredictable nature of egress fees.

The 60s are Back – It’s Return of the Monoliths

Look, this isn’t a new phenomenon – this is typical of the early stages in new industries, stretching back to the beginning of the computing industry.

Here’s a picture of a data center from the 1960s.  Nearly every piece of equipment has an IBM logo on it.

Other vendors of that era, including Univac, NCR, and RCA, were completely incompatible with IBM.  Software written for one couldn’t be run on the others and the peripherals were incompatible.

While I was in grad school at Princeton, I worked part-time for RCA.  They had a really great CPU, but they forgot about such things as printers, input devices, and storage.  Instead of making their CPU interchangeable with IBM, they chose to try to do it all themselves with the result that they soon got killed off.

No Vendor is an Island

Nobody, including IBM, can be best at everything.

As everyone now knows, EMC came along with 100% IBM-compatible storage devices and took that market from IBM.  Then IBM lost the printer business. Then memory boards, and so on.

Pretty soon they became the company that was ok at everything but not great at anything, and ultimately had to completely re-invent themselves with an entirely different business model.

Now, of course, when you walk into a modern data center you see dozens of manufacturers hardware all working together, e.g., Cisco routers, Juniper switches, Dell CPUs, NetApp storage devices, Canon printers, etc.  

Thus it will be with the cloud.

It’s going to require new providers, like Wasabi and Packet, to team up to give you all of the benefits of going to the cloud, without the downsides of bricking you into today’s Cloud 1.0 walled garden.

It’s a return to best-of-breed options that YOU choose, rather than mediocre monoliths plodding along as though their business interests are more important than yours.

We have exciting things coming in 2019 as we continue to expand our relationship with Packet and a larger ecosystem that has exactly this mindset. You shouldn’t have to compromise or be held hostage to get the high-performance enterprise-grade cloud system that is tailored to both your technological needs and business needs.