New research released by Turbonomic and Verizon has revealed several key reasons for businesses wanting to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, from business continuity to resilience – yet cost is still a burning issue.

The study, which polled 1,821 IT decision makers, saw the need for business continuity as the most important business driver for adoption of multi-cloud, cited by 77% of respondents, ahead of increased resilience (74%), and reduction of operational expenditure (70%) and capital expenditure (69%). However, with regard to selecting vendors, 70% said pricing was the primary consideration, ahead of 51% who opted for service level agreements or quality of service.

More than four in five organisations identified at least 12 different management issues they were facing including balancing performance and cost (90%), delivering IT services to the appropriate budget (89%), and ensuring consistent application performance (86%).

Yet these aren’t the only challenges faced. 81% of those polled said choosing the right workloads for the right clouds is an issue, while 84% had problems with evaluating cloud vendors to meet business and technical requirements.

Charles Crouchman, CTO at Turbonomic – formerly VMTurbo – argued the one factor which will change the mindset of organisations who look at cloud as cost first is ‘experience.’

“As the cloud moves from shadow IT to enterprise IT, the costs will become more transparent – in particular, the cost of assuring that your end users are getting what they expect from your service or brand,”

he told CloudTech.

“Smart companies understand that customer delight is the path to success – and focusing solely on cost is not a recipe for assuring customers are delighted with your service.”

Crouchman added that he wasn’t surprised by the main survey result – that organisations are facing so many management challenges – but that organisations need to look at cost versus performance from a different perspective.

“The reality is that while price and cost impact your CFO and company, performance impacts your customer,”

he said.

“Without them you don’t have revenue, so you have to focus on all of the trade-offs.

The reality of the impact poor performance or downtime has on your customer means that you will pay for performance no matter what – and it is in each cloud’s economic interest for you to pay as much as possible.

So CIOs who believe that the cloud will invariably reduce CapEx or OpEx costs will soon face the reality of cloud bills that are larger than they expected,”

Crouchman added.

Earlier this month, Google announced the acquisition of cloud commerce platform provider Orbitera, ostensibly with multi-cloud strategy in mind.