Security is the top risk to enterprise multi-cloud adoption

New research from IT services provider Ensono finds that security is the biggest concern for IT professionals considering, or already using, multi-cloud strategies.

UK IT professionals rate security, governance and cost optimization as their top three concerns for multi-cloud strategies, while security, cost optimization and maintaining a positive end user experience are the top concerns in the US.

Managing cloud deployments has led many to look for external support, 43 percent of surveyed IT leaders have turned to a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to overcome issues with their multi-cloud strategy. Of those working with MSPs, 46 percent are attracted by the prospect of faster time to adoption, and 44 percent by the ability to tap into skills that are unavailable or lacking internally.

Amazon Web Services (55 percent) and Microsoft Azure (54 percent) are the most common areas of public cloud expertise within businesses. US businesses are best placed internally to work with AWS, compared to UK firms where Microsoft Azure edges ahead.

Of course no current research is complete without a look at the COVID effect. Around two-thirds of IT leaders (67 percent) say that COVID-19 either didn't disrupt, or had even accelerated, their plans to move to a multi-cloud environment. Yet economic uncertainty has made this a difficult road for some businesses. Nearly a fifth (19 percent) of respondents say that COVID-19 has slowed their adoption of multi-cloud as priorities have changed and investment redirected to other areas.

Brian Klingbeil, chief strategy officer at Ensono, says, "With the surge in interest in cloud technology, firms need to deliver a cloud strategy that is right for them. Complex deployments like multi-cloud present a wide array of potential challenges. Before a migration, businesses need to undertake a thorough audit of their existing applications and put together a comprehensive roadmap to the cloud. This planning will ensure that fundamentals like security, user experience and cost optimization do not fall by the wayside in the journey to the cloud."

Looking to the future, 49 percent of respondents believe that distributed cloud could be the solution to network related issues and outages, while 42 percent believe that it could eliminate latency issues and 36 percent think it can lead to an increase in availability of locations from where cloud services can be hosted or consumed.

"Multi-cloud is an attractive option for businesses looking for a flexible, resilient cloud strategy," Klingbeil concludes. "It offers firms a route to the best of both worlds: receiving all the benefits of different cloud providers and protecting the business against vendor lock-in. When set up in multi-cloud, containers are an ideal way to start innovating in the cloud -- quickly porting and scaling up applications to deliver for the business. And for businesses seeking even more location flexibility for their public cloud infrastructure, distributed cloud may well be the future."

You can find out more on the Ensono blog.

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