A quick Google search for multi-cloud deployments reveals that there is surprisingly little information about such deployments available. We think that is unfortunate. The research community, without a vested interest in keeping customers under a single corporate umbrella, has long been thinking in those terms (cf. the European RESERVOIR and Optimis projects, both of which we have been involved with). Now that the technology world is increasingly maturing around the notion of cloud adoption in general, the benefits of multi-cloud deployments compared to single-cloud ones are also becoming more widely recognized:

• increased resilience against failures that can take out an entire cloud region or cloud provider (along with your backups!),
• better performance for end-users, as they can be served by cloud resources that are located geographically closer to them, and
• potentially lower operational expenditures, if end-users in a geographical region can be served well by a less expensive local cloud provider

…to name but a few. The recently published XO Communications-sponsored IDC white paper entitled “Why Are Enterprises Connecting to Multicloud Services?” lists other multi-cloud benefits.

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