You're already using multi-cloud, whether you know it or not

A panel of IT professionals discuss their multi-cloud strategies, and explain that every business is already across multiple clouds, whether it realises it or not

Almost all organisations already use multiple cloud services, with potentially sensitive corporate data stored across many different networks, whether they realise it or not.

That's one theme to emerge from a panel discussion at today's Cloud & Infrastructure Live conference in Central London.

Karthik Selvaraj, senior cloud architect at Purple Bytes Limited, a technology consultancy, explained that many free services most people take for granted actually constitute multi-cloud use.

"If your staff use Gmail or Hotmail, you're already using multi-cloud, they're hosted in the US."

Jim Evans, chief technical architect at the Office for National Statistics, continued the point.

"If you use SaaS you're already across multiple clouds without realising it, and that's how it should be," Evans began. "Below that, throughout your organisation, you're probably consuming multiple clouds. Your developers probably use GitHub, and continuous integration infrastructure provided by a host of different suppliers.

"You're probabaly using services for security like Darktrace. Your people may be using subscription services like Adobe Creative Cloud, or Jira or Trello for project management. When you take a real look throughout your organisation there are a lot of subscriptions which can quickly be embedded into your business processes without you ever realising," said Evans.

This chimes with an earlier presentation which suggested that organisations have many copies of secondary data hosted in various places in different environments, which poses both a cost and efficiency overhead, and poses regulatory problems.

George Tunnicliffe, head of IT operations at the National Theatre explained that he would like to outsource his entire data centre to the cloud.

"The National Theatre was built and opened in 1972, nobody was thinking about computers and the space they might need then. Now our internal data centre uses space that would be better used by artists.

"So we're looking at cloud. We use AWS, and quite a lot of PaaS and SaaS, because the big providers can do it on a scale we can't, especially keeping those services running reliably, which I can't do with the size of team I have. That allows us to focus on what we're good at, rather than focusing on disk space, RAM, load balances and these technical concepts," said Tunnicliffe.

Adam Simmonds, lead architect at Coventry City Council explained that his organisation mostly uses Microsoft, but is slowly shifting to AWS as it consumes more cognitive services.

"Lots of our stuff is built on the Microsoft stack. But when we looked at some of the more cognitive services, things using AI and ML, we felt that Google seemed to be leading the way more there. So if we do anything there we tend to lean towards Google. We've also done some internal API development which we hooked into AWS too, so we've always said it'll be whichever solution delivers the best value for what we're trying to achieve," said Simmonds.

Evans added that his organisations is expected to be cloud-first.

"Government rules oblige us to go cloud-first for everything, so we have to prove why we can't do something on the cloud, otherwise that's the only option."

When asked how to choose between the different services on offer in the increasingly crowded cloud marketplace, Tunnifcliffe said that services like Computing's new market intelligence platform Delta are helpful.

"Delta is very helpful because it shows you what's going on in the market, and helps you see how these services are being used."