The new connectivity will go some way to addressing criticism by regulators that AWS does too little to help enterprises operate across multiple cloud providers.
David Terrar, CEO of UK industry body Tech Industry Forum, was cautiously optimistic. However, he expressed misgivings as to how the move would be viewed by the authorities. “The Competition Market Authority is already concerned about the state of the cloud market — AWS and Microsoft already account for 80% of the market and with Google having between a 5 and 10% marketshare, the CMA may well be looking into it.”
The CMA concluded an investigation into the cloud market in August, leaving the situation pretty much untouched. However, the European Commission may not be so lenient: the Commission announced its own review into the market dominance of the two giants in November.
A multicloud strategy presents some challenges, but many benefits, so the move by AWS and Google will certainly be attractive to customers.
According to Terrar, the drive towards AI is going to accelerate the requirement for multicloud deployment. “Agentic AI will be a big thing and multiclouds will be a big thing as part of this.” A survey from Futuriom suggested that 82% of enterprises expect that the growth of AI applications will accelerate demand for multicloud deployment.
He did however approve of the importance of the open approach. “It’s important to have an open standard, it’s the ideal way of simplifying things.” There is the question of which organization would ratify an industry standard and Terrar was concerned that the process would get tied up in bureaucracy. “It’s important that we proceed quickly and we don’t end up with something that is over-regulated.”
