Michael Chen, Senior Writer | February 20, 2025
Multicloud is a cloud computing strategy that pulls together services from more than one provider to meet an organization’s needs. A multicloud solution may integrate IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in a tightly or loosely coupled architecture and is seen by CIOs as a good way to both avoid lock-in and get the best fit for each workload. A well-designed multicloud setup should consider software compatibility, network capabilities, performance demands, redundancy, security, operational management, and total cost of ownership. The services set is typically driven by cost, business need, and data governance requirements.
Cloud providers often offer managed services and self-service tools to help customers succeed. The goal is to simplify the design and deployment of multicloud solutions by abstracting complexity and helping with integration.
A multicloud architecture is when an organization uses multiple public or private cloud services from different providers in its technology stack. The benefits of a multicloud setup often depend on the level of integration among the cloud providers and services.
In a basic multicloud scenario, enterprises simply use different cloud services for different purposes—similar to how a consumer might use a streaming video service from one vendor and cloud-based photo storage from another, accessing both via their home internet. In a more advanced business multicloud environment, integration allows applications running in different clouds to communicate and share data. This reduces the need to duplicate data between services and helps organizations use the hardware, software, services, and other tools available on each platform to their best advantage.
In a multicloud architecture, an organization uses several public or private cloud services from different providers to deliver IT services.
Management and orchestration layer
Multicloud and hybrid cloud are slightly different concepts with significant overlap. A multicloud approach focuses on using multiple independent cloud providers along with on-premises resources. A hybrid cloud approach focuses on the mixed use of a primary or single public cloud offering and an on-premises data center.
Hybrid clouds are often used by organizations that need to secure highly sensitive data locally or that have specialized needs. Hybrid clouds can also accommodate a phased transition to an all-cloud strategy, using either a single-vendor or multivendor approach. In practice, most organizations are multicloud users, since they have operations in more than one public cloud offering.
Key Takeaways
A multicloud strategy allows organizations to distribute their workloads across multiple cloud platforms and providers. This helps provide flexibility when picking the right tool for each job. By selecting the best cloud service for each task, IT architects can take advantage of each provider’s strengths, including custom hardware, software, and service capabilities.
Because a multicloud approach involves two or more cloud providers, management occurs on multiple levels. Each platform has its own management tools and dashboards, which allow IT to oversee, configure, and execute granularly within that environment. IT teams monitor the bigger picture a layer above that, and factors such as resource use, policy compliance, interoperability, and operational optimization are all ideally handled by a multicloud management system.
A multicloud strategy lets organizations use multiple cloud computing services from different providers to meet their needs. The potential benefit is more flexibility, redundancy, and scalability versus partnering with a single cloud provider.
For example, a business might choose one provider based on its trusted database while using another for inexpensive storage or machine learning services.
Most organizations use or plan to use more than one cloud provider to achieve multicloud benefits, which may include cost optimization, data residency, and business agility. The key to achieving these and other upsides is choosing the right mix of providers. The good news is that, with some due diligence, enterprises crafting a multicloud strategy can optimize service, price, and functionality while maintaining their unique IT architectures and improving data security and interoperability. Getting there takes some work, but when done correctly, a multicloud deployment can substantially benefit an organization.
Here are some key possible benefits of a multicloud strategy:
While multicloud is a useful—and, in many ways, inevitable—approach, overlapping technology and managing distributed data can create challenges. The following are some of the most common:
To address these and other issues, plan to invest in training and development programs or partner with cloud service providers that offer managed services.
When designing a multicloud architecture, it’s essential to consider the need for data movement, new sources of latency, and methods for operations management, orchestration, and security.
Consider data movement.
Some applications will require, or could benefit from, access to data held in on-premises databases or in other clouds. Moving the data is easy. Maintaining its security and establishing access control mechanisms that are at least as robust as those of the source system is hard. Data movement takes time and may incur egress fees. Many organizations will find that it’s better not to move data into new databases, opting instead to use the same database system across the clouds they use—an option made practical by recent agreements between cloud providers that now allow Oracle’s database platforms to run in the data centers of other hyperscale cloud providers.
Minimize latency.
Network latency directly affects application performance, and different applications have different latency requirements. Some require very low, microsecond latency, while others can tolerate double-digit millisecond delays.
Standardize operations management and orchestration.
Each cloud may have its own set of tools and workflows, all requiring specific knowledge and expertise to allow for smooth connectivity and effective troubleshooting and management. Establishing standard practices and procedures for multicloud management across cloud platforms wherever possible is vital for success.
Plan for security challenges.
In a multicloud environment, disparate security tools and multiple vendors can result in more complex security operations and increased headcount, leading to higher costs and new risk exposure.
A layered security strategy can simplify matters by using built-in security services offered by each cloud provider in combination with partnerships between cloud providers that allow for the consistent management of services.
Organizations of all sizes have used Oracle’s cloud infrastructure to deliver an IaaS platform as part of their multicloud strategies.
A multicloud architecture is born when an organization integrates cloud platforms or services from two or more providers. Sharing data between clouds is a common driver of integration. Depending on the need for data security or low latency, integration can be as easy as defining access methods between the two cloud environments. But when requirements for data security, consistent governance, and low latency are high, look for orchestration between clouds, typically enabled by agreements between vendors.
In either event, it’s always better to architect systems so the bulk of each application’s data use is contained within a single vendor’s cloud.
A multicloud approach can complicate application and data management, especially as an organization’s infrastructure expands and its provider count grows. Careful vendor selection and steering development efforts toward standards-based microservices that can run with few modifications in any cloud can help.
Here are some best practices to consider when developing a multicloud strategy.
1. Plan for Migration and Integration
IT teams can maximize ease of integration with some smart decisions—for example, by picking platforms that are ecosystem partners, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure, and creating their own private clouds by developing strict operational and usage protocols that rely on open standards. Efficient and effective interoperability among services can deliver a greater return on a multicloud investment, so favor providers that have standing partnerships when possible.
2. Create a Database Strategy
Most organizations have developed a database strategy that revolves around one or two strategic products. It’s easy to stray from that path in hyperscale clouds, where using the vendor’s offerings is an easy choice. But that leads to a bifurcated strategy that comes with difficult choices when repositories aren’t compatible—using data from the two systems can involve complicated processing, and security and governance policies rarely align.
A single database can help simplify data management, making it easier to maintain consistency and data integrity across the environment. It also allows for easier querying and analysis of data from all sources, providing a more holistic view of your information while helping lessen complexity and improve security and governance.
Database strategy should consider the long-term use of data by the business as broadly as possible. Strategic data that’s highly sensitive and critical to the company should be kept in systems where security and governance have been worked out. Individual vendor cloud database offerings still have a place, but they shouldn’t be the default.
Fortunately, it’s increasingly easy to run your database of choice in the cloud of your choice.
3. Investigate Integration and Automation Services
As hyperscale cloud vendors forge partnerships, they’re also developing ways to help customers use their offerings across each other’s services. Some of the first partnerships have involved establishing high performance networking between public clouds as well as between public clouds and customers’ private clouds. These services offer better latency than simply using the internet and typically don’t charge for data egress—costs that can add up with other data egress mechanisms.
They also offer services that help with integration, automating the process of moving data when necessary. One of the most common applications is staging data for analytics. Finally, multicloud orchestration systems can help IT manage an organization’s presence in each cloud from a single system.
4. Enable Real-Time Data Movement and Management
In a multicloud environment, real-time data movement and management involve the transfer of data between cloud platforms. This is achieved via APIs, data connectors, and automation tools that enable data to be transferred and synchronized in real time across different clouds. With real-time data movement and management strategies, organizations can keep important data up to date and accessible, regardless of which cloud platform it’s stored on.
5. Set Policies for API Management and Endpoint Security
As stated earlier, interconnectivity is one of the big benefits of a multicloud architecture and should be considered a key part of a multicloud strategy. To make it work, IT teams must establish consolidated API endpoints and integrate identity and access management systems, both of which can be difficult tasks depending on the platform and its related tools. Also, interconnectivity introduces a new security concern, as services will be exposed to each other across multicloud environments, thus requiring appropriate permissions for all systems involved.
6. Focus on Data Security and Compliance
While working with multiple cloud providers has benefits, as we’ve discussed, it can also introduce data security and governance challenges that require a fresh risk evaluation. One of the first things to consider is data confidentiality. Some applications, such as finance and HR apps, host sensitive data, while other systems, such as marketing tools, have less rigorous privacy demands. Creating appropriate levels of access between applications is key to protecting sensitive data, and this work requires active monitoring across the entire multicloud environment.
7. Add Monitoring and Management Tools
Capable monitoring and management tools are invaluable for IT teams tackling the complexity of multicloud environments. While these tools may add expense, they can provide full-stack visibility for multicloud applications and infrastructure, allowing for real-time monitoring, resource management, and automation, making them worthwhile investments. Many of these tools also include analytics that offer insights into resource and usage that may head off performance problems and reveal ways to save money.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) multicloud services help companies combine multiple clouds to optimize cost, functionality, and performance. Specifically, Oracle helps modernize your databases and applications with solutions such as Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Autonomous Database. Partnerships with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and others allow you to combine Oracle’s unique capabilities with leading services from other cloud providers.
OCI’s 40-plus global cloud regions help you meet data residency requirements, and multicloud services help you easily establish standard operational and management practices, procedures, and tools across cloud platforms to maximize your people, processes, and technology.
A multicloud environment provides redundancy and helps ensure high availability by allowing you to spread workloads across multiple platforms. This approach can also help you optimize your IT spend, as you can choose the most cost-effective cloud services for each workload. Overall, multicloud offers a versatile and agile approach to cloud computing.
Newly forged multicloud partnerships among hyperscale providers reduce data silos and costly interconnects to help deliver improved performance for analytics, AI, edge computing, enterprise applications, and more. Here’s how.
What is an example of a multicloud strategy?
An example of a multicloud strategy would be a company that uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its computing power and storage while simultaneously leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for its advanced AI capabilities and localization. This approach allows the business to enhance reliability by distributing workloads across different hyperscale platforms while also selecting the most cost-effective options. By employing a multicloud strategy, the company can harness the strengths of each provider, gaining greater flexibility and resilience in its IT infrastructure.
What is the difference between cloud and multicloud? The difference between cloud and multicloud computing lies in the considered and strategic use of multiple cloud providers for infrastructure and services, which can include data storage, computing power, and various applications sold in an as-a-service model. With a multicloud strategy, businesses can better leverage the strengths of different platforms, optimize costs, and enhance resilience by distributing workloads across various environments, thus improving performance and mitigating the risks associated with relying solely on one cloud provider.
What companies use multicloud? Companies of all shapes and sizes in all industries use multicloud strategies. If you use two different cloud providers—even for basic tools and services, such as email servers or document storage in a shared drive—then you’re a multicloud shop. Enterprises often choose a multicloud approach for technical reasons, for cost reasons, or simply because they prefer to have more than one vendor partner. Gaining exposure to multiple cloud platforms can speed up a company’s migration to the cloud and help IT get out of the data center business.
Is multicloud a good idea? For most companies, yes. A multicloud strategy allows for maximum customizability and works whether you’re all in on the cloud or splitting operations between on-premises and cloud environments. Compared with using a single cloud provider, a multicloud approach gives organizations greater flexibility and freedom to select the features and services that best meet their needs.
Why is multicloud the future? As more and more software and services move to the cloud, a multicloud approach is inevitable. Consider the basic ways that cloud services have been integrated into business operations: data storage and backup, cloud email servers, chat and video collaboration tools—the more these become vital to operations, the deeper organizations will get into their multicloud configurations, which is why effective management tools and strategies are critical.