For all sorts of reasons, CIOs increasingly find themselves trying to introduce (or impose, resurrect, or enforce) governance, compliance, audit and oversight across a dizzying array of cloud solutions. Some may have been introduced by themselves or their predecessors, but most have entered the business by other means.

image of clouds in the desert

Multiple clouds, in the Nevada desert (Source: Paul Miller)

Perhaps they've been procured, properly, by departments from Sales and Marketing to Logistics and Customer Support. Or perhaps it's a lone developer or a small team, with a company credit card and a problem to solve.

However it happened, your business is already a multicloud business, and the CIO is — increasingly — expected to answer for inefficiencies, regulatory lapses, poor financial controls, and more, wherever they crop up in a sprawling and confused IT estate.

The easy solution might be, at first glance, to assert control. To select a single provider, and to enforce that selection. To prowl the corridors of the business, plucking public cloud credentials and SaaS admin accounts from the unwilling fingers of employees. 

But the braver CIO is the CIO who embraces their multicloud reality, who works to understand how and why committed and engaged employees felt it necessary to seek out their own solutions, and who learns lessons from the failures of the recent past.

And it's this CIO who is the champion of my latest report, published today: A Clear Multicloud Strategy Delivers Business Value.

Do you agree? How do you manage the multicloud reality in your business? Or has it already been driven deep underground, through fear that you're coming to take the toys away?