Multi-Cloud

Multi-cloud is usually sold as risk reduction and delivered as a tax: a second provider means a second set of IAM models, networking primitives, billing dashboards, and on-call runbooks to maintain, permanently, whether or not you ever use the failover it was meant to provide. The question is never whether multi-cloud is possible — it always is — but whether the ongoing operational cost buys something the business actually needs.

Most teams that end up multi-cloud didn't decide to; they acquired a company, or a team picked a different provider, or a vendor tool only ran on one cloud. Multi-cloud should be a decision with a stated reason, not something you discover you're already doing.

1. Name the reason before building anything

The legitimate reasons are narrow: a regulatory requirement to avoid a single vendor, genuine negotiating leverage at large spend, a specific managed service only one provider offers, or disaster-recovery requirements that mandate provider diversity. "Just in case we need to switch" is not on that list — it's a hedge against a risk that's rarely priced against the daily cost of carrying it.