As we know, many traditional managed services remove control from your hands and lock you into black-box solutions into which there is little to no transparency. You end up with systems you have no insight into and have trouble decoupling from once you decide you want to change vendors.

Not long ago,The Register offered this tongue-in-cheek prediction: “What sector of tech is forecast to grow fatter than the Slovakian economy or Elon Musk’s ego in 2018? The cloud. Global spending on the fluffy white stuff is predicted by mystics at Gartner to reach $175.8bn this year.” This doesn’t appear to have been an exaggeration. Acloud industry insights report from Right Scale indicated that 96% of companies across industries have embraced cloud services, for any number of reasons, including faster, more innovative delivery and cost reductions, among others. And more than half of the companies surveyed were deploying multiple clouds for different reasons as well as any number of hybrid on-premise and cloud mashups that together make up a custom solution to suit each individual company.