VMware's current vision is all about multicloud architecture, driven by its customers' pleas for relief from the complexity of operating securely in multicloud environments, CTO Kit Colbert told SDxCentral in an interview.

All customers have challenges relating to their use of multiple clouds, whether that's around security, migration, modern application development, or managing an increasing number of endpoints.

“Traditionally, customers used to keep all their apps [and] all their data inside the data center. They could lock that down, put a strong perimeter around it, and have safeguards based on that,” Colbert said. But in today's world where software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, data, and devices are everywhere, “it's just kind of a chaotic situation,” he explained.

He posited a solution as “the right sort of multicloud and user services coupled with security services” that offer end users flexible security. On top of cloud provider-specific services, customers need a level of consistency, Colbert said.

VMware says the majority of its customers use more than one cloud, highlighting an overall industry trend of cloud diversification. “Whether intentional or not, the position most folks end up with is that they are using multiple clouds. So then the question becomes, what do you do about it?” Colbert asked.

He noted many companies' efforts to be multivendor in the cloud space by using both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, for example, but that isn't quite the same as true multicloud, Colbert explained. “How do you move from this multivendor, where you use them individually, to multicloud, where multicloud actually becomes a bit more of an architectural approach or technology approach?”

“What we're trying to do is paint the starting picture of what a multicloud service can look like and what different capabilities are there. So that's really what this [multicloud architecture] framework is all about and where we think things are going,” he said.

VMware hopes to work with the broader industry on defining a multicloud service to provide optionality around consistency. Most apps today run on and support a single cloud, but a multicloud architecture offers opportunities to expand that technology to run on a single cloud while being able to manage across multiple clouds.

“The goal of this sort of architecture is really to give people choice,” Colbert said. multicloud will never be a one-size-fits-all answer and there's still value and merit to standard, single cloud services. “We definitely encourage folks to leverage services that are dedicated to a single cloud or part of a single cloud, but as part of that broader portfolio of options,” he noted.

And this is the direction he sees the whole industry moving in. “We're actually working with some other industry participants to drive some announcements around that to try to get some industry coalescing around it,” Colbert said.

In the past 15 years, the industry has pretty much figured out what a cloud application or cloud service looks like, so now it's time to figure out what multicloud services should look like, he explained.

When companies begin their relationship with the cloud, they tend to start with a single cloud provider, which is beneficial in that cloud services from one vendor are usually well integrated to build a consistent experience. “But what we quickly start to see is that proliferation, right?” Colbert said. “What we're advocating for customers is how do you sort of think for not just your current situation and challenges, but also what are the next ones that are going to come?”

And that's what multicloud architecture is all about, he said. It's about setting yourself up for future security needs by choosing tools that support a variety of cloud environments “just in case I am going to end up there,” Colbert explained.

To that point, “if you're gonna go in and invest all that time and effort in terms of doing the research and set up and so forth, then [multicloud] is a worthwhile thing to go and investigate,” he urged. “Given that at some degree multicloud is an inevitability, let's plan for that so you can best embrace it and manage it when it comes to fruition.”