Today’s organizations have three key requirements of their IT teams: the agility to modernize applications at the speed the business demands, the freedom to build and run them on the cloud of their choice – whether in a data center or at the edge – and the resilience afforded by enterprise-level security and operations.

For many businesses, however, the innovation required to deliver on these requirements is being stifled by complexity. Cloud is often the cause of this complexity if not managed correctly, but it can also provide the solution.

I’d like to highlight my top three strategic lessons for making sure your multi-cloud journey delivers success in both the short and long term:

• Lesson 1 –Start viewing cloud as a model rather than as a place.The cloud is not a fixed location, but an entity that can growand be worked on by multiple teams. Its core, and everything that governs it,needs to stay the same. Businesses should be aspiring to a modern cloud infrastructure that is consistent everywhere, that evolves and extends the infrastructure to thousands of other cloud infrastructure partners. This consistency provides choice,while avoiding complexity.

• Lesson 2 –Success relies on continuous delivery.Ensuring applicationsdeliver consistent value to lines of business requirescareful care and provisioning of each and everyapplication. This relies on being able to understand and track the requirements and performanceof that application, and to understand what it needs, when it needs it. Doing all of that manually is an impossible ask, which is why a solution such as the new VMware Cloud Console, a single monitoring and management environment for VMware Cloud infrastructure regardless of where it’s deployed, is so significant.

• Lesson 3 – Prioritise the apps that offer the most value. It’s easy to get sucked into the “plan everything, complete nothing” cycle, or opting to do a complete lift and shift of all your applications without considering what’s required of each one. The secret is in knowing which will provide business value quickest and prioritising them.Before embarking on any cloud project, businesses should ensure that they have done the work to identifythese applications, and the cloud environments that best suit them.

With 2021 described as the year of multi-cloud, businesses have never been better placed to start harnessing the power of cloud and ushering in a new era of applications. The flexibility and choice that it offers enables best in class applications that in turn empower companies to offer the user experiences that today’s consumers demand and deserve.