Distributed cloud-native applications represent a tantalizing, if complex, opportunity for enterprises looking to bring new, more resilient services to market faster than ever, Vijoy Pandey, Cisco's VP of engineering and CTO of cloud, said during a panel discussion on multicloud and hybrid cloud networking earlier this week.

The panel, hosted by IDC, included Alkira CEO Amir Khan, Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney, Cisco’s Pandey, and Verizon Associate Director of Global Products Oliver Cantor, and sought to the challenges and business opportunities for enterprises adopting multicloud and cloud-native architectures and how best to address them.

All of the panelists cited “business agility” — in other words, the ability to build and deploy services when and where the organization needs and wants to — as the primary driver of multicloud adoption.

“I think people are facing the challenge where it was okay for the network to be slow, and now that people are getting used to the cloud, they know how quickly they can adopt and deploy newer types of applications in their environment and start offering it to the broader community,” Khan said. “One of our customers says that we need to move at the speed of the business, not the speed of the network.”

Mullaney echoed Khans sentiment arguing that adopting multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures ultimately comes down to survival.

“The business benefit is a driver of the most fundamental driver of every organism in life: survival” Mullaney said. “That’s what’s driving this. If I'm competing with people that are playing by the rules that we set up 30 years ago where we do things in the timeframe of years, and they're doing things in hours and days, we're going to die.”

The panelists also largely agreed on the biggest barrier standing in the way of multicloud adoption: complexity.

“Enterprises are just shaking their heads at all of this complexity,” Cantor said, adding that these challenges can be broken down into three broad categories: connectivity, multicloud management, and the ability to manage all of this from a “single pane of glass.”

Adding to this complexity, Mullaney said it's not the infrastructure teams deciding where applications are going to run. These decisions, he explained, are being made based on business outcomes and where the application in question is going to perform the best and for the lowest cost.

Because of this, he explained, a business might run one workload in Google Cloud because of the platform’s machine learning capabilities, another in Microsoft Azure for Active Directory support, and they might push their Exadata database into Oracle’s cloud because of the ease of migration.

“Now it’s four or five different public clouds, and by the way, agility is now part of the word mission critical for these enterprises. You don’t get to say what year do I want that service, it’s next week,” Mullaney said.

And this becomes even more difficult as enterprises transition to cloud-native workloads and grapple with issues like data governance and other legal requirements, Pandey explained. “So we are moving back into self-hosted, private [data centers],” and into edge data centers close to the end-users, he said.

As a result, this is not just a multicloud problem, but a hybrid cloud one too.

Where the panelists didn’t necessarily see eye to eye was how best to address these challenges.

Cisco is addressing the challenge from an infrastructure standpoint using tools like SD-WAN and the company’s Service Mesh platform. According to Pandey, policy and design intent are arguably the best places to architect these multicloud networks, and it's down to ensuring that it's easy for customers to integrate at an API level. “Anything beyond that drives complexity,” he said.

Alkira and Aviatrix have both developed platforms explicitly for abstracting and automating the process of deploying and/or networking multicloud workloads.

“They want agility. They want control over their environment so that they can come up with the policies, which meet their compliance and governance requirements and costs is another major issue,” Khan said. So is security, he said, adding that while enterprises want it to be simple, they also need fine-grained control.

“If you don't provide the control for the detail-oriented folks, where you can have your routing policies, or inter-company routing, or inter-segmentation routing, and all the detailed stuff that the customers have been used to in the existing environment, then you are not able to do justice to it,” he explained.

Verizon, meanwhile, is focusing on providing multicloud networking as a managed service for customers.

“Unless you come to a big global company that has a lot of engineering skills, we will get you there faster” and safer, Cantor said. “You can go and string together a lot of different technologies if you like, and you may get it right, you may get it wrong. But if you want longevity and you want to do things properly you are going to go to companies that know how to scale and know how to operate in multiple countries.”