You’ve got cloud! She’s got cloud! You’ve all got cloud! Now manage it… As ebullient as Oprah was with her infamous car giveaway in 2004, enterprises are gleefully winning when it comes to their cloud investment. They’ve done the research, invested in the architecture, and forecast the budgets. Cloud is the intelligent step towards an agile, digitally transformed, market capable, flexible and robust organisation. In fact, according to research published by the IBM Institute for Business Value, 85% of enterprises are already operating within the multi-cloud environment, with 98% planning to use multiple hybrid clouds.

But, just like the cars, there’s a catch. The audience members who walked away with those cars also received a $7 000 tax bill from the government and were given three choices: lose the car, keep the car and pay the tax, or sell the car and pay the tax. A sour note? Perhaps. It applies to cloud how? It looks easy on paper and wonderful in the moment, but the reality is a complex fabric of cloud vendor, agreement, platform, hybrid environment and data silos that has to be managed effectively.