Best Of Breed Cloud: Why Enterprises Mix Microsoft Azure, AWS And Google Platforms

For example, online retailer Ocado, has opted to use both AWS and GCP because potential retailer customers of its own platform are ‘fearful’ of Amazon handling their data.

The company’s head of data, Daniel Nelson tells TechWeekEurope that while Google was deemed the better platform to do the firm’s data work, AWS was still ideal for its operations and microservices.

However, a huge part of the reason it using both is because there are particular retailers would would prefer not to use AWS.

Mix and Match

“I know some people – particularly retailers, will prefer not to use a stack of a competing retailer,” he says.

“They’d say they don’t want to use this service provider – and even though it perhaps should not be a concern to them, it’s definitely not something we’d want to get in the way [of the retailer doing business with Ocado],” Nelson states, adding that there are multiple retailers who he knows are fearful of competitors.

Kumar agrees with the logic of Ocado deciding to not use AWS for this specific reason, but he adds that at this stage it wouldn’t be a concern for eve, as it is still a start-up.

“It’s better to be safe just in case, because Amazon could potentially look at the sales of the whole market and prioritise how they deal with the customer – so if your sales were helping Amazon’s analytics, I don’t think that would be a good thing,” he says.

One of the key reasons while enterprises decide to consolidate onto one cloud platform is so that all of their technology solutions are better integrated.

Integrating and lock-in

However, the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft have been working on this space to ensure integration is easier.

“Microsoft and AWS are both allowing data migration between the platforms – of course it can cost a lot of money but you can migrate and you’re not locked up completely with one vendor,” says Kumar.

According to Google’s VP of cloud, Brian Stevens, Google has been working hard on ensuring customers don’t feel ‘locked in’ with GCP.  He works with a consortium of banks and healthcare organisations who he says are risk-averse and therefore want to make sure they can use multiple clouds.

“Because none of them want to use just one vendor, we created a forum which Intel is hosting, and in which Google and Azure are participating,” Stevens explains.

“What they didn’t want is to have three conversations on future requirements such as network security and operational tools, and mainly the way things are configured – they don’t want all of us [ [cloud providers] to do it differently as it is burdensome on IT organisations to use the cloud, so we’ve created an open dialogue with other providers.”

Quiz: What do you know about the cloud in 2016?