Two of the main obstacles to creating effective cloud infrastructure are nearly opposites. On the one hand, enterprises that are new to the cloud may be at risk of vendor lock-in that restricts flexibility and drives up storage costs. At the same time, others have built clouds that are difficult to manage due to a patchy amalgamation of services and hardware from different providers. Companies may be able to avoid both situations by turning to an open source multicloud.
The creation of ineffective clouds may be attributable to the lack of a cloud-related equivalent to the various consultancies that have guided on-premises software updates. Accordingly, organizations may struggle to find a suitable provider that offers sufficient support and staying power. The New York Times' Quentin Hardy recently reported on the state of small and midsize businesses that were in the midst of cloud migrations, finding that these organizations face a daunting array of choices in regard to cloud storage, services and hardware.
"We can do things a lot faster, because we aren't bound by big software upgrades every two years, with lots of consultants," the Schumacher Group's Douglas Menefee told The New York Times. "There are lots of pain points, too, though – too many products from different providers."
On the other end of the spectrum, the emergence of category leaders, along with the presence traditional software vendors attempting to gain a foothold in the cloud market, has raised the prospect of cloud consolidation and lock-in. While some of Hardy's interviewees foresaw a future dominated by a handful of vendors, other cloud executives have pointed to open source projects as a safeguard against such a reality.
VentureBeat's Christine Farr chronicled a recent conference appearance by Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, who expressed optimism about the future of cloud Linux. Open source management software and hardware may give enterprises the cost-effective tools they need to create coherent custom clouds.
