Multi-cloud means running workloads on more than one public cloud provider. For some teams it is a deliberate design choice. For others it simply happens over time. Either way, it changes how a DevOps team builds, secures and pays for what it runs. This article sets out the commonly cited benefits and costs, what regulators are saying about switching providers, and the practical questions worth answering before you commit.
Why teams choose multi-cloud
Okta’s overview of multi-cloud lists the following benefits that organisations typically look for:
- Less reliance on one provider. Spreading workloads reduces the risk of depending on a single vendor.
- Best-fit services. Teams can use a specialist service from one provider without moving everything there.
- Compliance. Using several providers can help meet data privacy and residency requirements such as GDPR.
- Resilience. More options for failover and disaster recovery, and fewer single points of failure.
- Performance. Connecting several providers can support higher performance and lower latency.
What it costs you
The same overview lists the trade-offs: higher cloud costs from managing several vendor relationships, more complex security across environments, a need for specialist skills, and difficulty protecting data spread across several environments. Cost is a good example. In the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud report, as summarised by SoftwareOne, managing cloud spend was the top challenge, cited by 84% of organisations, and 27% of IaaS and PaaS spend was reported as wasted. Those figures cover cloud use in general rather than multi-cloud alone, but they are a reason to set up cost governance early.
Lock-in is now a regulatory topic
Two recent developments are worth knowing about if you are weighing up how easy it would be to leave a provider.
- In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority published the final decision of its cloud infrastructure market investigation on 31 July 2025. It recommended that the CMA use its digital markets powers to prioritise strategic market status investigations that would consider designating Microsoft and AWS. Its final report includes appendices on egress fees, technical barriers, licensing practices and committed spend agreements.
- In the EU, the Data Act restricts switching charges for cloud services. Providers may charge only costs directly linked to switching, and from 12 January 2027 no switching charges may be imposed. This applies to services in scope of the EU rules, so check how it affects you if you serve EU customers.
Neither is a reason to avoid a single provider, and neither is legal advice. They are a reminder to read your contracts for exit terms and data transfer costs before you depend on them.
Making it work day to day
One practical problem is credentials. Pipelines that deploy to several clouds often end up holding long-lived keys for each. AWS documents a way to avoid this for Azure DevOps: federating into AWS with OpenID Connect so that pipelines receive temporary, limited-privilege credentials from AWS Security Token Service instead of static IAM access keys. Our companion article on Azure DevOps pipelines covers the Azure side of the same idea.
Questions to answer before you start
- Which workloads actually need a second cloud, and what is the specific reason for each one?
- Who owns cost across all providers, and how will you see spend in one place?
- How will identity, access and secrets work across providers, and can you avoid long-lived credentials?
- Will one delivery pipeline serve every cloud, or will each provider have its own, and who maintains them?
- What would it take to move a workload away, and have you checked egress charges and contract terms?
Where we can help
If you are deciding whether multi-cloud is right for you, or tidying up an estate that grew that way, take a look at our DevOps automation and engineering, migration and cloud cost optimisation services, or get in touch.
Sources, checked October 2026: Okta, benefits and limitations of multi-cloud; SoftwareOne, Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud recap; UK CMA, cloud services market investigation; Bundesnetzagentur, EU Data Act cloud switching factsheet; AWS, federating into AWS from Azure DevOps with OpenID Connect.
