The top five reasons for a multi-cloud infrastructure

Having been focused in the cloud sector for more than 12 years now, I have experienced much fast paced change and continued assumptions, misunderstanding and over-promising of cloud as the saviour of all ills. Cloud is used as a generic term and yet covers a wide plethora of sub form factors (SaaS – software as a service, PaaS – platform as a service and IaaS – infrastructure as a service) and delivery mechanisms (private, public and hybrid clouds). Within these you then have a growing breadth of vendors with offerings, either born in the cloud or developed from former traditional on network server led models; each being architected differently from physical infrastructure components through to functionality, hosting locations, pricing and security models.