Why enterprises need a distinction between multiple clouds and multi-cloud - the latter requires careful network planning

As commonly used, the term 'multi-cloud' doesn’t imply anything about a user’s application architecture. However, once organizations with more than one set of cloud services start using them cooperatively and synergistically, they find that the design and implementation implications are far more significant than checking a multi-cloud survey box.That’s because, carefully crafted web-scale systems that anticipate a highly distributed and occasionally hostile network environment, most enterprise software is designed with the assumption that interdependent systems can easily communicate with each other with little resistance, i.e. latency, jitter, packet loss and bandwidth throttling in network-speak.Once an application is spread across multiple clouds, these assumptions go out the window if the services are interconnected, as is the case for most nascent cloud deployments, over the Internet using VPNs. In these cases, users are in for a nasty surprise if they expect the same repeatable performance they got from on-premises systems.Instead, IT organizations with distributed multi-cloud systems must pay as much attention to the network stitching clouds together as they do to the on-cloud application design and service selection. Unfortunately, it’s not in the best interest of cloud providers to make it easy to move workloads and data back and forth to competitors. Indeed, most charge transfer fees for the privilege.