In a recent conversation with a fellow IT leader, we were discussing vendor strategy. I shared that years ago I decided to go with best of breed for each use case, which meant Microsoft 365 for e-mail, Zoom for phone system & video conferencing, Slack for instant messaging, and Box for file sharing and collaboration. I was asked why I had decided not to go all-in on the Microsoft Cloud. Surely there's benefit to consolidating all of these use-cases on Teams, Sharepoint, and Azure, right? This morning's global 365 outage notwithstanding (and believe me, I'm grateful that only our e-mail seems to be affected at this point), I've finally come up with the two perfect words that describe this strategy: CLOUD DIVERSIFICATION! I've long thought that finding the best tool for the job was a better strategy than finding one platform to rule them all, because inevitably every platform has its pitfalls. By diversifying our cloud providers, we've inherently built in resiliency into our cloud infrastructure, ensuring that one provider's outage doesn't become a full-blown business disruption to us. Is it the most cost efficient? In some ways yes (competition keeps provider pricing honest) and in some ways no. But it sure seems difficult to justify the cost savings of a single provider on mornings like this when your business grinds to a halt because said sole cloud provider had a global outage. So what is the key to successful cloud diversification? Strategic planning. It’s not about adding complexity for the sake of it; it’s about ensuring the systems that drive your business are reliable, flexible, and future-proof. If today's outage has you rethinking your cloud strategy, it might be time to explore how a multi-cloud approach can strengthen your IT ecosystem. Let's keep the conversation going—what's your take on cloud diversification?
Diversification and best of need is a great approach. Then again, the occasional day off is nice, too! 😂
Just a guy with opinions...mostly about technology.
3wLove this take. By not taking this approach we put ourselves right back into the same situation we were trying to escape 15 years ago. Single point of failure. But I also think we have to acknowledge, that we will still likely have systemic risk. Think Cloudflare outages. But at the very least within our sphere of influence, I'll take vendor diversity over THEIR goal of vendor unification and lock in.