In today’s ever-evolving IT systems world the cloud & big data are no longer buzzwords, they drive strategy and an even heavy chunk of budgeting discussion. As big organizations gear up to invest big in their cloud strategies and the follower herd readies themselves, there are many trends that are coming to fore that are causing the CIOs bad headaches, especially at banks. Public cloud adoption is still not picking the steam as much as it was expected earlier. Regulators have stepped in and they have added another layer of non-technology stakeholders to be explained about the initiatives, risks, and strategies.

Meanwhile, the strategies are evolving as more and more cloud service providers are stepping in the scene, complicating the overall strategy to have a one cloud solution in place. AWS is an undisputed leader, but the race for next 4 slots in the top five is driving a strong race. Microsoft Azure came along in the disguise of Office 365 adoption.

Google took a very interesting approach. Google knows that they are late in the game, so whichever organization they reach out already have a cloud strategy that has AWS, Oracle, Microsoft. So, they took the innovative step of introducing their own tools in the developer community like Kubernetes. What does Kubernetes do? It orchestrates containers and even data and apps from multi-clouds. This resolves the primary blocker their Cloud sales team was facing, a statement like “Ohh!! we already have a cloud service provider shortlisted already”.

Google breaks the gate but introducing free training for GCP ecosystem. The training that AWS or AWS affiliate training partners charge a minimum of $2000 per candidate is offered for free for all by Google affiliated training providers. This brings the crowd of people who didn’t have personal money to go for an AWS certificate because their organization wanted to train only a few and not all because of limited budgets. Now with Google offering the developer on-boarding with no barrier, practically means in next 2 years GCP adoption could become most viable.

With orchestration tools like Kubernetes solves the problem of having huge risk element of having a single cloud PaaS or IaaS with only one vendor, Google’s multi-cloud strategy is all set to tilt the race for Number 2 towards Google.

Interestingly within Google, it is established that they themselves will leave Kubernetes’s internal use and adoption because Google doesn’t want to have the same technology running internal infrastructure and provided a solution in the market. This helps in avoiding any exploitation of system vulnerabilities discovered in user domain to contain any data breaches within Google.

All in all, Multi-cloud strategy will evolve further. Some organic growth may see Data Clouds getting separated from Applications cloud. The compute functions may get a segregated from the data storage and data onboarding processes. Oracle’s solutions may have a robust Data scalability aspects and AWS may have a better scheduler, and Kubernates native compatibility may give Google cloud an edge. All solutions are bringing something unique with them. It becomes interestingly unique for Enterprise Architects to design an overall system architecture that solves the use cases for the organization they’re with rather than just follow the trend of the most famous cloud solution.

This article was first published on www.agilityexchange.com.