As the move to cloud continues we are starting to see a new development, with organisations no longer relying on a single cloud provider to deliver their key services, many now opting for multiple providers, from their own data centre to hyperscale big boys, multi-cloud environments are becoming the norm.

This multi-cloud environment makes perfect sense, the whole point of adopting cloud is to provide you with the flexibility to consume your data, infrastructure, applications and services from the best provider at any given time, which would be very difficult to do if we only had a single provider.

However, multi-cloud comes with a challenge, one rather well summed up at an event recently by the phrase “clouds are the new silo’s”. Our cloud providers are all very different in the way they build and operate their infrastructure and although when we take services from one provider we may well not notice or care, when we start to employ multiple vendors it can quickly become a problem.

How to avoid cloud silo’s is seemingly becoming a technology “holy grail” engaging many of the world’s biggest tech vendors. This is only good news, as we move into a world where we want the freedom and flexibility to choose whichever “cloud” is the best fit for us at any given time, then will will only be able to do this if we overcome the challenge that comes with managing and operating across these multiple environments.

Taking on this challenge is the subject of this week’s podcast with my guest Lauren Malhoit of Juniper Networks and co-host of the excellent Tech Village Podcast.

Lauren recently sent me a document entitled “The Five Step Multi Cloud Migration Framework” It caught my attention as it discusses the multi-cloud challenge and provides some thoughts on how to address it and it is those ideas that form the basis for this week’s show..

We open the discussion by trying to define what multi-cloud is and why it’s important that we don’t assume that all businesses are already rushing headlong into self-driving, self-healing, multi-cloud worlds. We chat about how a strategy is more likely to be for helping a business start along this road, rather than managing something they already have.

We explore how multi-cloud doesn’t just mean Azure and AWS, but can equally apply to multiples of your own datacenters and infrastructure.

Lauren shares her view on the importance of automation, especially when we look at the need for consistency and how this is not just about consistent infrastructure, but also compliance, security and manageability.

We also ask the question, why bother? Do we really need a multi-cloud infrastructure? Does it really open up new ways for our organisation to operate?

We wrap up looking at the importance of being multi-vendor, multi-platform and open and how that openness cannot come with a cost of complexity.

Finally, we discuss some use cases for multi-cloud as well as taking on the challenge of people in our business and the importance of how a multi-cloud world shouldn’t be seen as a threat, but as an opportunity for career growth and development.

I hope you enjoy what I thought was a fascinating conversation about an increasingly pressing challenge.

To find out more about the work Juniper are doing in this space you can look out for forthcoming announcements at Juniper.net as well as check out some of the information published on their Github repo’s.

To find out more about the work Lauren is doing you can follow her on twitter @malhoit or her blog over at adaptingit.com

Also check out the fantastic Techvillage Podcast if you are interested in career development and finding out about the tech world of others in the IT community.

Juniper also have some great resources for learning about designing a multi cloud environment check out the original white paper that inspired this podcast The Five Step Multi Cloud Migration Framework and you’ll also find some great info in this post Get Your Data Center Ready for Multicloud

Until next time – thanks for listening