Multi-cloud is no longer a deliberate architectural choice for most enterprises. It is the reality that emerges from acquisitions, departmental autonomy, best-of-breed service selection, and regulatory requirements. Most large organizations find themselves running workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP alongside on-premises infrastructure, with each environment hosting critical business applications. The challenge is no longer whether to adopt multi-cloud but how to build integration, governance, and operational strategies that work coherently across providers.
Integration Across Cloud Boundaries
Connecting services across cloud providers introduces challenges that do not exist within a single provider. Network connectivity requires careful design with options including VPN tunnels, dedicated interconnects, and service mesh federation. Identity and access management must work consistently across providers, often through a centralized identity provider that federates into each cloud. Data transfer costs between providers can be significant and must be factored into architecture decisions. Successful multi-cloud integration requires an abstraction layer, whether a service mesh, an API gateway, or an integration platform, that normalizes these differences.
Avoiding the Lowest Common Denominator
A common mistake in multi-cloud strategies is attempting to use only services that are available identically across all providers. This lowest-common-denominator approach negates the primary advantage of multi-cloud: leveraging the best services each provider offers. Instead, design your architecture with clear abstraction boundaries that isolate provider-specific implementations behind portable interfaces. Use managed Kubernetes for workloads that need portability, but do not hesitate to use provider-native services like AWS Lambda, Azure Cosmos DB, or Google BigQuery where they provide genuine advantages.
"Multi-cloud success is not about treating all clouds the same. It is about building the abstractions and governance that let you use each cloud for what it does best."
— Ascylla Engineering
Unified Observability and Operations
Operating across multiple clouds demands unified observability that provides a single view of system health regardless of where workloads run. This means adopting cloud-agnostic observability tools like Datadog, Grafana Cloud, or OpenTelemetry-based stacks that can ingest telemetry from every environment. Operational runbooks and incident response procedures must account for cross-cloud dependencies, and teams need training on the specific failure modes and debugging tools of each provider they depend on.
Governance and Cost Management
Multi-cloud governance requires centralized policies for security, compliance, and cost management that are enforced consistently across all providers. Cloud Security Posture Management tools that span providers help ensure consistent security configurations. FinOps practices must aggregate cost data across all clouds to provide accurate total cost of ownership and identify optimization opportunities. Tagging standards, budget alerts, and chargeback models should work uniformly regardless of the underlying provider.
Ascylla specializes in multi-cloud integration strategies that help enterprises leverage the best of each cloud provider without drowning in operational complexity. From network architecture and identity federation to unified observability and FinOps implementation, our cloud architects bring the cross-provider expertise needed to make multi-cloud work in practice.