The total market of cloud vendors and consumers with a multi-cloud strategy still grows, although the share of hybrid cloud strategies has slightly decreased.
The overall adoption of cloud went up to 96% with both multiple private cloud and multiple public cloud consumption seeing a slight increase from 2017.
There are various pros and cons of whether to opt for a multi-cloud strategy. For instance, not being dependent on one party, or able to compare features, performance, costs and the support offered.
The end customers’ demand plays a very important role. After all, it gives you the opportunity of a broader audience and a better selling proposition. The influence of privacy legislation on cloud vendors in various countries is something to be considered as well in choosing your strategy.
The biggest disadvantage of multi-cloud often mentioned is missing out on a quantum discount, manageability and billing woes. It is striking that the majority of cloud service providers and SaaS companies are not able to evaluate their cloud vendors properly. A 2018 International Data Corporation Survey found that less than 10% of European organizations are multi-cloud ready.
To ease the hassles of management, it is wise to use a provisioning party. This way you are able to manage the usage of various cloud services. It becomes easier to switch licenses on and off and to get a grip on the actual usage. You are also able to quickly compare software sets from different providers.
Step two is to make sure you are able to bill all this usage properly, and in a fashion that your customer understands and trusts. Manual invoice composition is still quite common today which leads to errors and wasted effort. We also see quite some complex calculating tools pushing spreadsheets to their limits.
This is where a billing tool like CloudBilling offers an attractive solution. With such a billing tool there is no need for complicated calculations. The usage of cloud services gets measured and run through the configured pricing rules. This then gets transformed into clean and clear invoices.
CloudBilling allows you to connect multiple cloud platforms, licenses and even your own services.
CloudBilling also allows you to cross-check the invoices from your vendors against the reports generated within the tool. Thereby ensuring that you are not being overcharged. You will be surprised to know how often vendors make errors in their invoices because of incorrect calculation logic that goes unnoticed. We all know that fixing billing errors can be a tardy process and consume further time.
The advantages of a multi cloud setup seem immense, and we see more and more enterprises moving in that direction. While it is a very attractive proposition, it is important to make sure that when you join the ride, you have all your bases covered.