One of the most significant conundrums faced by any organisation that plans a cloud migration is that there are many clouds to choose from, each with its own variables relating to performance, features, and cost.

Rarely does an organisation get this decision entirely right the first time, and rarely too does an organisation’s changing needs not lead it to consider changing its decision later.

Hence when it comes to discussing cloud migration, it is important to look at not just migration into the cloud, but migration between clouds.

The prevalence for organisations to use more than one cloud provider is reflected in a Statista report that found 86 percent of respondents stated that their organisation used a multi-cloud strategy as they sought to achieve better cost control and optimised performance.

But where once a multi-cloud strategy might have been adopted as a risk mitigation strategy, the increasing reliability of cloud service providers meant today migrations were being undertaken for very different reasons.

Meeting cost expectations

According to Gartner director analyst Adrian Wong, many organisations that sought a multi-cloud strategy did so seeking a cost benefit. However, few would find one.

“I’ve spoken to a bunch of organisations who thought having a second cloud provider would give them more negotiating leverage, but largely speaking, that’s not the case,” Wong said.

“[Cloud providers] are going to give you discounts based off your total committed spend, and if you start splitting that, you are going to get less of a discount.”

Wong identified a second downside of multi-cloud as being the added requirement for supporting personnel, as each new provider required its own unique set of skills.

“If you are going to be looking at multi-cloud it is going to be expensive, it is going to be complex, and it is going to be an ongoing effort that you are going to have to continually invest in and maintain,” Wong said.

“So as much as possible, stay on a single cloud provider.”

While the costs of a multi-cloud strategy might prove difficult to manage, that doesn't mean that cost management isn’t also a driver for cloud migration, as this was one of several factors that led the diversified comparison platform company Finder to migrate its entire environment from one public cloud provider to another last year.

“The rationale behind that was being able to gain a tighter control over our costs, and simplification of our infrastructure,” said Finder’s chief technology officer Joe Waller, adding that the company’s extensive used of containerisation meant it could run on any cloud platform.

Migration drivers

According to Wong, there were also numerous other drivers for multi-cloud strategies beyond cost, including when an organisation sought to take advantage of a capability that only one provider could offer.

“There are capabilities from cloud providers that speak to different niches in the market,” Wong said.

“So we often see tactical adoption by these organisations, picking cloud providers for very specific use cases, and only using that cloud provider for that use case.”

And despite the arguments coming from traditional hardware manufacturers, Wong said he had not seen significant evidence of entire environments being moved out the cloud.

“It’s not something that we see taking place on a large scale,” Wong said.

“I’ve had a grand total of zero conversations where they are looking to go about that.

“What we have seen is organisations who have moved things to the cloud and found it is a lot more expensive than they realised, so in that case they might move selected workloads back on premises, but I wouldn’t say it is everything. They have started the journey and want to know how to continue from here.”

MYOB is one company that has adopted a strategy for workload deployment that general manager for reliability and security Peter Wolski described as ‘poly-cloud’.

“Our cloud strategy adapts to product purpose,” Wolski said.

“We predominantly partner with two cloud providers and choose to put some workloads into one over the other, but it is a trade-off, and we need to think through why we are doing that.”

Wolski said that by considering the needs of workloads and customers first, he could adopt the best of what providers had to offer, including taking on edge services where appropriate.

“I think AI is going to be a catalyst for that, where you want some of the decision-making to be closer to the thing you are solving rather than back in the cloud,” Wolski said.

Finding safe haven

Often the need for cloud migration is driven by factors outside of the organisation’s control.

Melbourne-based Onyx Gaming provides gaming management systems to venues across Victoria, Queensland, and NSW, using a core application that was originally developed and hosted in-house by a third party. According to its senior technology leader Tim Sullivan, after acquiring the application his company had needed to find a new provider to host it.

“We are not the kind of organisation that has all the infrastructure capability to manage that equipment – I would prefer our guys to be looking at our venues and what’s making a difference there,” Sullivan said.

“So we made a decision to not invest a lot of capital to stand something up when we can leverage trusted partners and just have an operational cost allocated for that service.”

However, when Onyx’ first choice was unable to meet expectations, another provider was sought, leading to the application’s migration to a private cloud solution hosted by Melbourne- based provider Interactive, which has taken on responsibility for the application’s uptime, patching, maintenance, and monitoring.

Sullivan said that the choice of a private cloud provider over a public provider was driven by Onyx’ desire for a more personalised relationship.

“It is easy to have conversations about a particular resource or how something is set up,” Sullivan said.

“It is about having a partner that you can directly call and escalate, and have some good service management timelines, rather than being one of how many other businesses who might have an incident.

“Public cloud is cheaper, it is more scalable and quicker, but you need to ensure that you have all the skillsets.”

Sullivan added that Onyx was happy to work with public cloud providers for other less critical applications.

“I don’t see cloud as a new and emerging technology,” he said.

“It is just how you run infrastructure now.”