Many companies moving to cloud find later that they need to use both private and public clouds and different cloud providers for these cloud types. The wide variety of business requirements results in a need for various cloud offerings, each focused on a particular service set such as enterprise applications in Azure, fast expanding spectrum of services in Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) in Oracle Cloud, and machine learning in Google Cloud. Regulatory requirements – for example, data locality in a given country – makes local cloud providers preferable because the applications can run locally where their data are stored. Cost optimization, availability and performance requirements are other factors contributing to selection of multiple cloud offerings

This article explores the emerging multi-cloud concept, benefits of multi-cloud computing, architecture of multi-cloud solutions, implementation of multi-cloud strategy, cloud services brokerage, unified management of multi-cloud services, application and data portability across different clouds, and other aspects of multi-cloud services.