Statements like “we run on AWS” and “we run on Google Cloud” are increasingly punctuated with commas instead of periods. Multicloud is dividing information-technology environments into checkerboards with legacy workloads here, cloud-native workloads there, and so on. This demands services that can hack it in any and all clouds; and it may even disaggregate and atomize the whole cloud and cloud-services market.

“Do you want to pledge allegiance to a single public-cloud provider forever?” asked Erik Kaulberg (pictured), vice president at Infinidat Ltd. “If the answer to that is no or if there’s any hesitation in that answer, then you need to be considering services that go beyond the walled gardens of individual public clouds.”

Of these services, the ones around data and data portability are the ones that will really make or break a company in multicloud, Kaulberg added.

Kaulberg sit down with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a CUBE Conversation at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how multicloud is affecting decisions about data, workloads, and perhaps the future of cloud economics (see the full discussion with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Workload economics

There are additional tricky pieces to wrangle into place (or places) in multicloud. Among them are application state, security and compliance. “But if you don’t get the data problem figured out, then everything else becomes a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot more expensive,” Kaulberg said.

Infinidat has been busily rolling its portfolio of storage solutions together for cross-cloud consumption. In May, it announced its Elastic Data Fabric program — basically the company’s manifesto on how enterprises should deal with data in multicloud. The goal is to keep data free, portable and not locked into one environment.

“Our Neutrix Cloud service can allow customers to keep sovereignty over their data in order to make the right decisions about where the compute should reside across whichever public cloud might offer the best combination of capabilities for a given workload,” Kaulberg said. 

We’ll continue to see multicloud customers push for granular, workload-based provisioning of cloud services, according to Kaulberg.

“I think that in the long term, we’ll get to this world where cloud compute providers … truly have to compete for enterprise workloads, where you essentially have a marketplace where the customer gets to say: ‘I have a workload. I need x cores. I need x capabilities. The data’s right here in Neutrix or in something like Neutrix. And what will you offer me to run this workload for 35 minutes in Amazon?’ Same thing to Azure, same thing to GCP,” Kaulberg concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Infinidat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Infinidat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE