5 Winning Cloud Investments And Multi-cloud Strategies Partners Should Know

Cloud visionary David Linthicum understands the complexities of the multi-cloud world and what businesses truly need from solution providers to achieve their digital transformation goals.

“The days of, ‘You have to use this one cloud brand and that’s it,’— are over. [Businesses] are deciding on what are the best-of-breed cloud technologies they need to bring to bear. If that’s multi-cloud—in other words, it’s going to get them into a more complex operational state — so be it,” said Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer of global IT consulting powerhouse Deloitte Consulting.

“So IT has to hurry up and do some planning to figure out how they’re going to operate things moving forward. That’s the big rush right now,” he said.

Linthicum, who is also a best-selling author and hosts a popular technology podcast, is responsible for building innovative cloud solutions for $50.2 billion consulting services behemoth Deloitte in order to help its customers operate more efficiently.

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The complex multi-cloud environment facing businesses today can be daunting, he said, and enterprises need to be effective once they achieve it.

Linthicum said after enterprises set up a multi-cloud environment, they cannot just sit there and do nothing “because operational complexity will kill them.”

“They can’t quadruple their ops budget and ops tools. In other words, adding more people and more technology,” he said. “So they have to figure out how to do things in a smart way which is going to allow them to run an environment where we’re moving from say: 1,000 cloud services and applications under management, to as many as 10,000. And doing so with the same amount of resources. That’s normally what we’re wrestling with these days. That seems to be the major trend.”

Led by Linthicum, Deloitte Consulting has been creating unique cloud frameworks and multi-cloud strategies to help customers of all shapes and sizes successfully operator and flourish.

In an interview with CRN, Linthicum explains five key strategies and investments that are helping Deloitte Consulting succeed in the multi-cloud world that channel partners should take note of.