What is multicloud?

In a multicloud environment, you choose different cloud providers based on performance, cost, compliance, service offerings, or geographic availability. These different cloud environments may or may not be integrated, depending on your architecture and goals.

Multicloud solutions might include data management services, compute power, data analytics tools, and machine learning platforms, potentially sourced from multiple vendors. The key benefit of multicloud is flexibility and choice; you select the best cloud services for each task rather than settling for a one-size-fits-all approach.

An effective multicloud strategy involves thoughtful planning, governance, and the right tools to ensure performance, security, and interoperability across environments. When adopting multicloud, you should aim to distribute your workloads, applications, and services strategically across various cloud platforms to maximize benefits and minimize risk.

When implementing a multicloud strategy, begin by evaluating your needs—such as compute resources, storage, machine learning capabilities, pricing, security requirements, and compliance mandates—and then match those needs to the most suitable provider. For example, an enterprise might use one cloud provider to host its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, but run analytics workloads in a private cloud. Meanwhile, they could host customer-facing applications on a cloud provider with a strong global infrastructure. These workloads might function independently or be integrated using APIs, middleware, and container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. Cloud management platforms, identity and access management solutions, and monitoring tools also help streamline operations across cloud environments.

Avoiding vendor lock-in. One of the primary motivations for using multicloud is to avoid reliance on a single cloud provider. Vendor lock-in can limit flexibility, raise costs, and make it difficult to migrate applications or data. By diversifying across providers, you maintain more control over your infrastructure and can switch or scale services as needed.

Optimizing performance and cost. Different cloud providers offer varying pricing models, geographic availability, and performance benchmarks. A multicloud strategy allows you to place workloads where they’ll perform best and cost the least. For example, latency-sensitive applications might be hosted closer to customers on a provider with a strong regional presence, while long-term data storage might be housed with a lower-cost provider.

Enhancing resilience and disaster recovery. With data and applications spread across multiple clouds, businesses are better protected against outages and disruptions. If one provider experiences downtime, services can fail over to another provider, improving business continuity. Multicloud services also improve disaster recovery plans by allowing replication across different cloud platforms.

Increased innovation and agility. Different cloud providers often excel in specific areas, such as AI, analytics, developer tools, or SaaS integration. A multicloud approach empowers teams to innovate quickly by choosing the right tools for each use case, accelerating development and deployment cycles.

Meeting compliance and data sovereignty requirements. In some industries or regions, data must remain in a specific location or meet strict regulatory requirements. Multicloud solutions help you meet these needs by using providers that comply with specific regional laws or industry standards.

Facilitating mergers and acquisitions. When two companies merge, they often bring different cloud platforms with them. Instead of migrating everything to a single provider—which can be costly and time-consuming—they can operate in a multicloud environment while gradually integrating or modernizing systems.

While a multicloud strategy offers flexibility, resilience, and access to top-quality services, it also has the potential to introduce challenges. Managing multiple cloud environments requires careful planning, specialized tools, and a skilled team to ensure consistent security, performance, and governance across platforms. Common multicloud challenges and solutions include:

Increased complexity. Managing and orchestrating services across multiple providers has the potential to complicate operations. To address this, adopt cloud-agnostic orchestration tools to streamline deployment and infrastructure management. Use cloud management platforms to centralize visibility and control across environments.

Security and compliance gaps. Applying consistent security policies, access controls, and compliance standards across different cloud platforms is challenging and might increase risk. Consider Zero Trust architecture and continuous compliance monitoring.

Cost management. Tracking cloud usage and optimizing costs across providers can be challenging. To optimize cloud costs, use a multicloud cost management platform to consolidate billing data, analyze spending trends, and identify opportunities for cost savings such as unused resources or over-provisioned instances.

Data integration and portability. Moving data between cloud environments or providing consistent access can be hindered by incompatible formats, latency, or high transfer costs. Employ data replication and caching strategies to reduce latency and avoid unnecessary data movement.

Skill shortages. IT teams might lack the expertise/resources to manage multiple cloud platforms, which have their own tools, APIs, and architectures. To help teams with multicloud, invest in cross-training and certifications for key cloud providers. Consider managed services or outside consulting for short-term expertise while building internal capabilities.

Vendor-specific limitations. Services and capabilities differ between providers, which might make it difficult to standardize or migrate applications. To counter this, design applications with cloud-native and portable architectures, such as containers and microservices.

Monitoring and observability. Gaining a comprehensive view of system health, performance, and logs across clouds can be difficult.
To overcome this, deploy a centralized observability platform that aggregates metrics, logs, and traces across clouds. Standardize telemetry formats and ensure uniform monitoring configurations across clouds, so you get a comprehensive view across your multicloud environment.

Governance and policy enforcement. Maintaining consistent policies around identity, usage, and resource provisioning is more difficult in a decentralized environment. With a policy-as-code tool, you’re able to enforce governance automatically and consistently. Use identity federation and centralized identity and access management systems to apply consistent access rules across cloud platforms.

By distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers, you gain the flexibility to choose the best tools for each task, avoid vendor lock-in, improve resilience, and better manage costs.

Whether your business is a startup seeking to scale efficiently, an enterprise optimizing workloads, or a global company operating in multiple regulatory environments, multicloud offers a tailored, strategic path forward.

As cloud providers continue to differentiate through innovation, businesses that adopt a multicloud strategy can tap into a wider range of capabilities, stay ahead of the competition, and ensure long-term adaptability. Multicloud is an appropriate strategy for almost any organization looking to increase agility, enhance resilience, or make smarter cloud investments.