Clouds are the Telcos of Data
"We should build our own national mobile phone network" said Dave. The CEO turned around confused "What?" she said. Not sensing the confusion Dave continued on, "Well we think that connecting our people and making calls is really important right?". "Yes, of course" replied his CEO "and?". Ploughing on despite the temperature in the room dropping by the second Dave continued to dig "So we can't leave mobile phone calls to the mobile companies, we need to bring it in house".
"Dave" said the CEO
"Yes?" said Dave
"You're fired" said the CEO
"Oh" said Dave.
It would clearly be insane for a company to build its own mobile phone network, you wouldn't even consider it 'outsourcing', its buying a service. The reality is that this is where the data market now is. The 'dirty little secret' of cloud has always been that data is the lock-in, and porting data is nowhere near as easy as changing a phone contract. But the reality is that the big 3 cloud vendors, and package/SaaS vendors like SAP and Salesforce are ensuring that heterogeneous cloud environments are the future. You just don't have the investment dollars to keep up with the pace of innovation.
Does this mean you just let them dictate? No, it means that you must be clearer and more restrictive in how you approach it. Legacy software and hardware buying patterns which drove massive heterogeneity will have to be changed towards cloud focused patterns which start from the cloud vendors stack and move away when it doesn't meet your needs. It means more focus on the layer ABOVE technology and how you control data as an asset. But the platform?
With data the only people who have their head in the clouds are the people whose data isn't.