By now just about every enterprise — and every enterprise infrastructure vendor — has a multicloud strategy and uses services from multiple cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. So it seems a little late in the game for A10 Networks to roll out a multicloud blueprint, though calling it “polynimbus” does add an element of allure.

But there’s actually a good reason for the Greek/Latin hybrid, according to the vendor. multicloud was phase one. It only addressed using multiple clouds, but that led to siloed data, sprawl, and more complex environments. Polynimbus is essentially multicloud phase two, and it addresses how to manage and secure applications running in these multicloud environments, said Paul Nicholson, senior director of product marketing at A10 Networks.

“multicloud is overused,” he said. “It’s not good enough to just move to the cloud,” he said. “You need to manage and operationalize that multicloud environment.”

And to this end A10 today debuted its Polynimbus application services blueprint as a way for enterprises to consistently manage and secure applications across multiple clouds. To coincide with the blueprint, the vendor released a multicloud survey it sponsored conducted by the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network. Perhaps to no surprise, the findings indicate improved security — including centralized security and performance management, multicloud visibility of threats and attacks, and security automation —is the No. 1 IT challenge facing companies in a multicloud world.

It also found that while two-thirds of companies have deployed enterprise applications across two or more public clouds, only 11% believe their companies have been “highly successful.”

“The data from the survey really backs up what we are trying to address with the blueprint,” Nicholson said. “We need to manage these clouds effectively as well as using these clouds.”

The company’s blueprint is “like a reference architecture, with products and solutions that match to this,” Nicholson said, adding that A10 will add new products and services to it over time.

The blueprint products address security, automation, policy, and migration from on-premises hardware and software to the cloud. A10’s software runs on any public cloud as well as containers, bare metal, virtual machines, and hardware appliances.

“We also have a full secure services stack,” Nicholson said. These, too, can be deployed on any public cloud and managed from a central console. Services include advanced load balancing, web application firewall, authentication access management, malicious traffic and bot mitigation, integrated distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection with real-time threat intelligence, data center firewall, L7 application scripting, global server load balancing, and TLS/SSL offloading.

A little over a year ago A10 started offering flexible and portable software licensing via a capacity pooling license so customers don’t need to buy new licenses for every cloud instance from multiple vendors. “You buy 10G capacity, you can slice and dice it however you want,” Nicholson said. “This is across specific cloud instances or containers or software.”

This keeps costs from climbing while allowing scalable architectures across environments.

“The next one is a differentiator for us,” Nicholson said, referring to the any-cloud central management piece of the blueprint. A10 originally acquired the technology for this piece when it bought Appcito in 2016. It expanded this technology and a year later launched the microservices-based Harmony Controller, which allows businesses to manage applications across multiple data centers and clouds from a central location. This helps address IT staffing shortages and ensures compliance across environments.

The blueprint also addresses DevOps and SecOps with automation and API support for lifecycle management and operations. This includes support for Ansible and Terraform.

Additionally, A10’s products include native or API integrations with partners including Cisco, Dell Technologies, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Nutanix, Oracle, Red Hat, and VMware.

And finally, it’s flexible and enables software scale out. This also supports micro-service container environments, virtual machines, bare metal, and hardware environments.