Multi-cloud strategy is one of those terms that sounds brilliant in a boardroom but can become a nightmare in practice. Every vendor pitch makes it seem straightforward - just spread your workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and you will have resilience, cost savings, and freedom from lock-in. The reality is far more nuanced.
I have spent over a decade managing infrastructure across multiple cloud providers, and the single biggest lesson I have learned is this: multi-cloud done badly is worse than single-cloud done well.
What Multi-Cloud Really Means
Multi-cloud means deliberately using two or more public cloud providers as part of a coherent strategy. Three common patterns:
- Best-of-breed selection - using each provider for what it does best
- Resilience-driven - running critical workloads across providers
- Commercial leverage - maintaining credible alternatives for pricing
When Multi-Cloud Makes Sense
Not every organisation needs multi-cloud. It genuinely makes sense when:
- You have regulatory requirements for provider diversity
- You are large enough to sustain the complexity (roughly 1.5x platform engineering effort)
- You have a genuine best-of-breed case
- You are managing acquisition risk
The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About
Skills multiplication
Every cloud provider has its own way of doing things. AWS IAM is fundamentally different from Azure RBAC.
Data egress charges
Moving data between clouds is expensive. Egress is often the line item that surprises people most.
Tooling sprawl
Each provider has its own monitoring, logging, security, and deployment tools.
Governance overhead
Security policies, compliance controls, and cost management all need to work consistently across providers.
A Pragmatic Multi-Cloud Framework
- Define primary and secondary providers - 70-80% of workloads on primary
- Standardise your abstraction layer - Terraform, Kubernetes, unified observability
- Establish unified governance - single framework across providers
- Build for portability where it matters - revenue-critical workloads, not everything
- Invest in your people - cross-training, runbooks, game days
The Verdict
For most organisations under 500 employees: focus on one cloud, do it well, invest in proper DR. For larger enterprises, do multi-cloud intentionally rather than accidentally.
The worst multi-cloud strategy is the one nobody planned. Start with why.
Read the full article at danieljamesglover.com.
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