Building cloud expertise is hard. Building multicloud expertise is even harder. By “multicloud” in this context, I mean “adopting, within your organization, multiple cloud providers that do something similar” (such as adopting both AWS and Azure).

Integrated IaaS+PaaS providers are complex and differentiated entities, in both technical and business aspects. Add in their respective ecosystems — and the way that “multicloud” vendors, managed service providers (MSPs) etc. often deliver subtly (or obviously) different capabilities on different cloud providers — and you can basically end up with a multicloud katamari that picks up whatever capabilities it randomly rolls over. You can’t treat them like commodities (a topic I cover extensively in my research note on Managing Vendor Lock-In in Cloud IaaS).

For this reason, cloud-successful organizations that build a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE), or even just try to wrap their arms around some degree of formalized cloud operations and governance, almost always start by implementing a single cloud provider but plan for a multicloud future.  

Successfully multicloud organizations have cloud architects that deeply educate themselves on a single provider, and their cloud team initially builds tools and processes around a single provider — but the cloud architects and engineers also develop some basic understanding of at least one additional provider in order to be able to make more informed decisions. Some basic groundwork is laid for a multicloud future, often in the form of frameworks, but the actual initial implementation is single-cloud.

Governance and support for a second strategic cloud provider is added at a later date, and might  not necessarily be at the same level of depth as the primary strategic provider. Scenario-specific (use-case-specific or tactical) providers are handled on a case-by-case basis; the level of governance and support for such a provider may be quite limited, or may not be supported through central IT at all.

Individual cloud engineers may continue to have single-cloud rather than multicloud skills, especially because being highly expert in multiple cloud providers tend to boost market-rate salaries to levels that many enterprises and mid-market businesses consider untenable. (Forget using training-cost payback as a way to retain people; good cloud engineers can easily get a signing bonus more than large enough to deal with that.)

In other words: while more than 80% of organizations are multicloud, very few of them consider their multiple providers to be co-equal.