As cloud adoption has constantly been on the rise, it is becoming increasingly risky for organizations to host all of their applications and data on one cloud provider. Risk can be mitigated through multicloud deployment, which spreads resources across multiple cloud providers.
If flexibility, resilience, and control over applications and data appeal to you, then you should consider this deployment. However, as it is a large-scale transformative endeavor, it makes sense to read about the pros, cons, considerations, and top tools, before making a decision.
SEE: What Is Multicloud Architecture? (TechRepublic)
What is multicloud deployment?
Multicloud refers to a deployment that depends on cloud services provided by two or more cloud vendors.
It also involves a calculated approach to the design and deployment of resources to ensure application architecture and the strengths of prospective infrastructure providers are complementary.
SEE: An Introduction to Multicloud Strategy (TechRepublic)
Pros of multicloud deployment
Resilience
Multicloud deployment ensures mission-critical services do not suffer downtime when a cloud provider suffers an outage. Such resilience is crucial for systems and applications that need to serve end users around the clock.
Flexibility
It enables organizations to stay flexible and agile in the face of constant and rapid change. It also allows businesses to satisfy different data needs and ensure data is available.
Compliance
IT compliance requirements around data privacy and data sovereignty often vary. When dealing with data that involves stringent security measures, multicloud deployments allow organizations to store sensitive data in a hardened private cloud and control how public cloud environments query them.
Avoiding vendor lock-in
Enterprises are not tied to one provider. This avoids any potential misalignments that may yield increased cost and ineffective service delivery.
Cost optimization
As cloud providers vary in offering and cost, organizations can choose which providers cost-effectively align with their initiatives.
SEE: Hiring Kit: Cloud Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)
Cons of multicloud deployment
Complexity
A single cloud provider may introduce a steep learning curve to teams as a result of the processes and systems IT teams are required to learn. Now, consider the impact of the adoption of more providers. It may be challenging to ensure teams remain competent across all environments.
Cost
Extra cost is generated from the additional traffic and management layer between cloud environments. There is also the cost of hiring and training staff for all the cloud environments and the cost of unutilized resources that can go unnoticed in complex cloud environments.
SEE: Multicloud vs Hybrid Cloud: Which One Is Right for Your Organization? (TechRepublic)
Considerations for multicloud deployment
There are a number of points to think about for a successful multicloud deployment.
Infrastructure
Any deployment plan should be specific about the target infrastructure, based on the current and future needs of various stakeholders. The plan has to take into consideration the impact of technologies like software-defined infrastructure or virtualization.
It is crucial to determine how required data format conversions will be carried out during the movement of data across public cloud and on-premises environments. This consideration still holds for the transit of data between different cloud providers.
Organizations need to determine whether a prospective deployment supports infrastructure self-provisioning as much as it can. These include infrastructure-as-code templates, particularly since IAC tools by cloud providers are vendor-specific and often tough to manage in multicloud environments.
The data stored in containerized environments needs to be correctly managed and secured. Containerized environments benefit multicloud environments, as they run code in the same way, regardless of deployment infrastructure.
Operations
There should be an understanding of the impact of the deployment on the IT landscape and where new roles may need to be established.
For example, business relationship management roles may need to be introduced to ensure business needs and IT services work in alignment. These roles should also be created with access control and multicloud security in mind.
One of the greatest challenges plaguing deployments is cost management. As a result, the plan must incorporate a cost management process to handle both current and future right-sizing.
It should be easy to move data from one cloud to another when required. However, users need to consider deployment tools that approach data replication, synchronization, and multicloud data transfer cost-effectively.
Organizations should also consider tools that manage and deploy the whole data fabric from a unified dashboard. This will provide transparency to the entire spectrum of end users. Such transparency ought to cover the billing and pricing models for these users.
Applications
Teams should evaluate which applications and workloads are best suited for specific cloud platforms. This can be determined by the availability of specialized compute, how simple it is to integrate a provider’s services and resources with other cloud environments, and the geographic locations of the provider’s data centers.
Securing and protecting data must be a priority, as data security stands as one of the top challenges to multicloud deployments. Any deployment should be augmented by effective authorization and authentication features to secure data. Encrypting data both at rest and in transit is a key measure to protect sensitive information.
Standardization and coordination of development stacks across clouds have to be considered to ensure consistent and swappable deployments across multiple clouds. Using continuous integration and delivery solutions can ease the shift to multicloud environments and make such deployments more consistent and manageable.
SEE: A Brief History of Cloud Computing (TechRepublic)
Top multicloud deployment tools
Flexera
Flexera is a cloud management tool with an array of discovery, operational monitoring, management, governance, template-based provisioning, orchestration and automation, and cost optimization across multicloud environments and virtual and bare-metal servers. It is suitable but not limited to small and medium-sized businesses in need of an orchestration engine and workflow automation capabilities.
VMware
VMware, which was acquired by Broadcom in November 2023, offers organizations the ability to migrate to the cloud without having to recode their applications. This enables businesses to modernize their infrastructure and consistently operate across multicloud environments, data centers, and the edge. VMware offers numerous products including VMware Cloud Foundation, Tanzu, Cloud on AWS, VMware Aria Suite (formerly known as vRealize Cloud Management), and VMware Tanzu CloudHealth (formerly known as CloudHealth by VMware Suite).
Azure Arc
Azure Arc extends the Azure platform to enable users to create applications and services that can run in multicloud environments, at the edge, and across data centers. Arc runs on new and legacy hardware, integrated systems, IoT devices, Kubernetes, and virtualization platforms.
Nutanix
Formerly known as Nutanix Beam, Nutanix Cloud Manager Cost Governance gives organizations visibility into cloud consumption patterns and provides solutions for cost management and security optimization.
Mist
Mist is an open-source platform that provides a unified interface for multicloud management. It supports all relevant infrastructure technologies, such as private and public clouds, containers, bare-metal servers, and hypervisors.
This article was originally published in August 2022. It was updated by Antony Peyton in July 2025.