Our organization is considering moving away from a single vendor to a multi-cloud approach involving AWS and Azure. What are the primary technical hurdles regarding data latency, cross-provider networking, and centralized security management that we should prepare for in 2025?
3 answers
Transitioning to multi-cloud significantly increases operational complexity. The biggest hurdle is often "data gravity"—moving massive datasets between providers is expensive due to egress fees and introduces latency that can break distributed applications. You also face the challenge of fragmented security; a policy that works in AWS Identity and Access Management doesn't translate directly to Azure Active Directory. To succeed, you need an abstraction layer, perhaps using Terraform for infrastructure and a centralized security dashboard, to ensure consistent governance across all cloud environments without doubling your administrative workload.
Considering the complexity you mentioned, do you think the redundancy benefits of multi-cloud actually justify the massive increase in cloud spend and specialized talent requirements?
We used a service mesh like Istio to handle the cross-cloud communication. It helps manage traffic and security between different providers more transparently for the developers.
Istio is a great suggestion, Kelly. It provides that much-needed abstraction for microservices, making the actual location of the service less relevant to the application logic.
That is the million-dollar question, Sean. For most, the answer is "no" unless you have strict regulatory requirements for vendor neutrality. In my experience, the cost of training staff on two different platforms and paying for cross-cloud data transfer often outweighs the uptime benefits. It’s usually better to be multi-region within one cloud than multi-cloud, unless you are at a massive scale.