Develop an intentional multicloud strategy by creating a full inventory of enterprise applications
Modern cloud strategy starts with clarity. If your enterprise is operating in a multicloud environment, and most are, then you need to know what you’re running and where. Application Portfolio Management (APM) brings structure to this. It helps you map out every enterprise application in use, identify overlaps, and determine opportunities for consolidation, modernization, or elimination.
When you have this level of visibility, you’re unlocking scalability, improving performance, and reducing both risk and cost. Clarity allows you to ask better questions: Why are there multiple apps doing the same thing? Are we getting what we pay for with each SaaS solution? Are we using the cloud for what it’s actually good at, or are we just paying for digital shelf space?
Scott duFour, CIO of Corpay, sees this play out in real terms. His team takes regular inventories, especially of SaaS tools, focusing on costs that often inflate during renewal cycles. They bring in procurement early in the negotiation process and look for redundancies across departments.
Gartner backs this logic. They state that the central goal of APM is to “identify, prioritize and propose opportunities to improve the portfolio,” including migration, replacement, or retirement efforts. If you don’t know what you have, you can’t optimize. Once you do, you gain leverage, both in cost negotiations and in performance improvements.
Simplify multicloud operations via unified management and governance frameworks
Multicloud isn’t about stacking providers for the sake of variety. You adopt multiple clouds for flexibility, but if you don’t connect the dots, things get fragmented fast. That fragmentation leads to complexity. And complexity slows you down, opens gaps in security, and inflates costs. You need uniformity in how things are run, and that starts with governance.
Unified management means using consistent processes and tools across all cloud platforms. This doesn’t eliminate individual clouds’ unique features, but it brings them into one operational rhythm. You still leverage the best from each provider, but you do it without compromising on oversight, efficiency, or security.
Randy Armknecht, Managing Director and Global Cloud Practice Leader at Protiviti, puts it plainly: “Managing multiple clouds is inherently complex, so unified management and governance are crucial.” He points to CNAPPs (cloud-native application protection platforms) as a foundation. These are tools built to enforce controls and give you clear visibility across environments.
Nigel Gibbons, Director and Senior Advisor at NCC Group, emphasizes risk: “It’s important for organizations to carefully assess their needs and develop a comprehensive strategy for adopting and managing multicloud technologies.” According to him, the cloud shift reaches deeper into the business than ever. It’s no longer an IT-only concern, product development, customer services, and revenue operations are impacted too.
Gartner data shows 90% of organizations will go hybrid cloud by 2027. The writing is on the wall: distributed infrastructure is the new baseline. The question is how clean and manageable your layer on top of it will be.
If you want speed with stability, flexibility with security, then your cloud environments must speak the same language. Governance is basic infrastructure hygiene. Without it, your multicloud play risks becoming a liability instead of a competitive advantage.
Implement a robust, consistent security framework across all cloud environments
Multicloud infrastructures expand your capabilities, but they also widen your security footprint. Every new cloud platform introduces distinct interfaces, configurations, and risks. Without a consistent security framework spanning all providers, this complexity becomes a liability.
The basics must scale across clouds. Identity and access management should be centralized. Permissions need to be role-based and auditable. Your security policies must reflect current compliance obligations and threat intelligence. If any provider is misaligned, the entire environment becomes vulnerable.
Nigel Gibbons, Director and Senior Advisor at NCC Group, is clear on this: “It’s imperative to ensure that only authorized users have access to the multicloud environment, and that they have the appropriate permissions.” He also notes that disparate APIs and vendor tools increase the attack surface. That reality demands a strategic security abstraction layer, something that oversees and harmonizes access controls, policy enforcement, and data protections across all platforms.
Randy Armknecht, Managing Director at Protiviti, reinforces this point. He highlights the need to enforce strong data protection practices consistently, including encryption, centralized identity controls, and reliable backup strategies. CNAPPs help, but they’re only effective when deployed as part of a broader architecture, one that’s deliberate and continuously monitored.
Security isn’t just about keeping threats out. It’s about maintaining operational readiness. When your platforms work together, your security posture strengthens. When they don’t, threat vectors multiply, and compliance risk follows.
If you’re running customer data, intellectual property, or critical systems in the cloud, there’s no room for fragmented security. A consistent, enforced, and visible security framework across all clouds is the foundation for responsible scale.
Leverage AI to automate management tasks and integrate operations across cloud services
Managing clouds manually limits your velocity. Distributed cloud environments generate massive operational workloads, monitoring performance, scaling resources, responding to incidents, and maintaining uptime. These are repetitive, data-heavy tasks, and they’re ideally suited for automation.
Artificial intelligence simplifies this operational layer. It interprets activity data across platforms, flags inefficiencies, predicts consumption trends, and enforces policies. If done right, AI brings scalability without compromise. It cuts out noise, improves response time, and removes human error from routine workflows.
Nigel Gibbons explains this well: AI “enhances efficiency by managing complex tasks like resource allocation, performance monitoring, and incident response.” More importantly, it integrates these tasks across multi-vendor ecosystems, reducing overhead and improving reliability.
Scott Simari, Principal at Sendero Consulting, points to AI’s role in reigning in multicloud sprawl. This happens when scattered deployments create blind spots that limit governance and increase costs. When policies are codified into automation engines, using principles like infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code, you get an environment that’s predictable, consistent, and automated by default.
This isn’t theoretical. Enterprises already codify governance rules into AI tools that run continuous checks across environments. They scan for misconfigurations, enforce access policies, and ensure regulatory alignment. That level of automation frees up teams to focus on high-impact initiatives.
Proactively monitor costs and optimize cloud spending using a FinOps mindset
Using multiple cloud providers can reduce operational bottlenecks, but it often leads to cost inefficiency if financial strategy isn’t built in from the beginning. Without disciplined oversight, cloud spending becomes reactive. Rightsizing, scaling policies, and vendor-specific pricing models must all be approached with a proactive mindset.
You need to track workload placement across providers, compare performance-to-cost ratios, and prevent waste from idle or oversized resources. That’s the core of FinOps. It’s operational finance that’s embedded in real-time infrastructure decisions, not just end-of-year reporting.
Nigel Gibbons of NCC Group notes that cloud pricing structures, usage patterns, and the pace of change require tailored cost strategies. His recommendation is straightforward: eliminate idle resources, automate scale-in/out mechanisms, and make full use of reserved or spot instances where workload patterns justify them.
Randy Armknecht from Protiviti adds that inter-cloud data flow comes at a cost, literally. The way your applications transfer, duplicate, and process data between clouds has budget impact. This needs to be mapped and optimized just as carefully as compute or storage plans.
Scott Simari from Sendero Consulting points to AI as an accelerator here. By analyzing historical consumption data, AI can forecast demand trends and support real-time rightsizing of environments. This reduces over-provisioning and ensures that capital is spent only where there’s actual workload demand.
Effective FinOps is about enabling agility without sacrificing budget discipline. Executives who approach cloud cost management as a fluid operational strategy, rather than a static line item, gain both transparency and control.
Design applications with portability in mind using microservices and containerization
If you’re operating across multiple cloud vendors, your infrastructure should support movement, not just deployment. Applications need to be portable. That’s where microservices and containers come in. They separate functionality and runtime environments from the underlying cloud infrastructure, letting you deploy and operate consistently regardless of provider.
Randy Armknecht, Managing Director at Protiviti, highlights that this approach avoids vendor lock-in and ensures resilience. With containerization, apps behave the same on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, regardless of where the app originated. Microservices break down applications into manageable components, so updates, scaling, and rollbacks are faster and safer.
Nigel Gibbons of NCC Group expands on this by pointing out how microservices support independent deployments, while native services allow specific cloud optimization. Combined with containers, you get environments that are flexible, scalable, and fast to recover during service disruptions.
The benefits extend beyond deployment. Development cycles accelerate, teams can iterate without waiting on full-stack changes, and systems can be diversified without increasing operational overhead.
For C-suite leaders, the message is direct: design systems that function across a heterogeneous cloud landscape. The investment in microservices and containers pays off in lowered risk, faster time to deployment, and a technology foundation that remains adaptable as cloud services evolve.
Adapt IT organizational structures and talent strategies for effective multicloud management
Scaling cloud strategy is about your people and how they operate. A multicloud environment introduces greater complexity and faster change cycles, which means the roles, skills, and workflows inside the IT organization need to evolve.
This demands more than hiring engineers with certifications. It requires a full rethink of team composition, operational models, and execution. Teams must be built with cross-cloud fluency. Specialists should understand how to work across platforms, combining knowledge of native services from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud with operational practices like DevOps, container orchestration, and policy-as-code.
Nigel Gibbons, Director and Senior Advisor at NCC Group, makes it clear: successful multicloud adoption only happens when the internal structure is ready for it. That includes investing in upskilling, restructuring silos, and changing how teams collaborate. Without that, scale breaks down.
Scott Simari, Principal at Sendero Consulting, emphasizes the importance of continuous learning. Instead of building fixed teams tied to specific providers, he’s seen the benefit of giving IT professionals exposure to multiple ecosystems. Attending cloud provider events, joining early access programs, and contributing to open-source tools are just a few ways organizations stay close to emerging tech without waiting for market-ready documentation.
Simari also advocates for creating a center of excellence (CoE). CoEs help centralize expertise, maintain a consistent architectural approach, and promote knowledge sharing across business units. They keep everyone aligned on best practices while allowing teams to move independently.
For executive leaders, the takeaway is simple: if your organization isn’t investing in the operational layer that supports multicloud, it risks losing the advantages that multicloud is built to deliver. Your strategy will only scale as fast as your teams can. The people managing your cloud environments need the structure and tools to adapt just as quickly as the technology they’re deploying.
Concluding thoughts
Multicloud is a business strategy. For executives, the challenge isn’t deciding whether to go multicloud. That decision is already made by the pace of innovation, by customer demand, and by the need for resilience and agility. The real work is making sure it scales in a way that’s secure, cost-efficient, and aligned with your long-term goals.
It starts with visibility. You need to know exactly what’s running, where it’s running, and why. From there, unified governance, consistent security, intelligent automation, and portable architecture aren’t nice-to-haves, they’re baseline requirements. And none of this moves without the right organizational design behind it.
If your teams are working in silos, tracking usage manually, or reacting to cost overruns after the fact, your strategy is brittle. But if you’re proactively optimizing spend, enforcing policies in real-time, and retraining your people for cross-platform fluency, you’re building real velocity.
Multicloud done right doesn’t slow you down. It expands your optionality. That’s what turns infrastructure investments into long-term competitive advantage.
