Digital Transformation initiatives have placed an increased pressure on the cloud as more businesses rely upon its use for optimum performance . Matt Nash , Cloud Manager , Pulsant , discusses why IT decision-makers can often feel like failed cloud jugglers when the business starts asking questions about why costs are rising without any comparable increase in performance or capability .

Strategy , however , is a loaded term . Many organisations that spread into multi-cloud environments without a defined strategy now find they are struggling to control , optimise or provide the full business benefits from uncoordinated architecture .

Exactly how many clouds organisations use will vary , partly according to definitions . In the Cisco Global Hybrid Cloud Trends report , 47 % of respondents employ between two and three public IaaS

( Infrastructure-as-a-Service ) clouds . The evidence from this report is that organisations follow the multicloud path because they need to balance security with business agility .

A multi-cloud approach has many advantages . It gives organisations the flexibility to access vendorspecific capabilities they would otherwise struggle to obtain , which is important for SMEs with small IT departments . They may host their web applications on AWS ( Amazon Web Services ) and Exchange servers on Azure . Organisations with a best-of-breed approach to IT also see that multi-cloud helps them avoid vendor lock-in . A business enjoys a wide choice over where to locate data and how it wants to access it , whether for compliance , latency , or cost reasons .

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