Despite how far advanced cloud vendors claim they are against the competition, cloud computing is still in its infancy, and there is a long way to go before a de facto standard of service delivery is established – especially as every vendor has their own take on cloud and application management tools.

IPsoft recently undertook some research into what effect this proliferation of different cloud services has on IT managers. It found that decision makers are adopting a multi-vendor approach to cloud, with more than one in ten reporting that they use ten or more suppliers.

This is an incredibly surprising figure. Sure, one might argue that the use of a multitude of suppliers demonstrates that the IT industry now has a very deep level of understanding of the cloud and knows how it can have the most business impact. But knowledge and understanding can only take you so far – the amount of time involved in managing over ten different clouds will be astronomical and unproductive.

The research also found that this multi-vendor approach to cloud has resulted in only 18% of businesses having access to a single view of their service status, with a further 34% unsure of how they manage their cloud infrastructure.

As businesses adopt cloud computing they should be thinking about how best to manage what they are outsourcing. It was not anticipated that we would see so few companies having a single view of what they are putting into the cloud. IT managers need to look at their infrastructure and ask themselves ‘can I really manage ten vendors or am I just increasing the complexity of my job?’

Whilst the majority of businesses are investing or using the cloud, over a quarter of decision makers admit that they have concerns about cloud sprawl and the increasing complexities they face with managing multiple cloud services. This indicates that although businesses see the benefits of going to the cloud, they are struggling to manage the new infrastructure which could lead to major problems in the future.

Outsourcing to multiple cloud vendors is a huge issue which has the potential to affect the IT managers who don’t have adequate management systems in place. There is no doubt that whilst cloud excitement hasn’t stalled yet, it has the potential to impact end results and have a negative effect on projects as confusion sets in. This will be especially true in a few years’ time, as different cloud applications are used for each and every business process.

My advice to any organisation adopting cloud would be to ensure a single management solution is in place, as this will help the IT department organise and manage multiple cloud vendors in real time and ensure the worry of sprawl is eliminated from the outset.