Review of Multi-cloud Platforms: Overview and Trends in 2025

In 2025, cloud computing serves as the foundation of modern IT technologies, which are rapidly evolving in functionality and complexity. According to Statista, public cloud services revenue will amount to over $934 billion this year, the evidence that highlights that the market is experiencing unprecedented growth. 

This shift is driven by the growing demand for AI-powered services, increasing security and compliance issues, and the need for flexibility and supplier diversity. As a result, more companies are adopting multi-cloud strategies, using multiple cloud providers to achieve the best performance, reduce risk, and provide flexibility.

In this blog post, we will look at the current state of multi-cloud platforms, explore their key benefits and challenges, and analyze the usage trends shaping the multi-cloud landscape in 2025.

What is multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud is a strategy whereby an organization uses cloud services from multiple providers (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, etc.) instead of relying on just one. What are the advantages? It allows businesses to choose the best tools for specific jobs, improve productivity, reduce costs, and avoid over-dependence on one provider.

A company can host its web applications on AWS, use Google Cloud for analytics, rely on Microsoft Azure for security services, and use SaaS applications such as Salesforce or Workday. These services work together in a multi-cloud environment to cater to different business needs. They are all pieces on the same chessboard playing for the same team.

This approach provides greater flexibility, strength, and scalability and is ideal for businesses seeking long-term agility in the cloud.

Сloud Differences

Cloud computing strategies vary, and choosing the right approach depends mainly on the company's size, industry, existing infrastructure, and long-term goals. Traditionally, cloud environments are defined by three basic categories: single-cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid. They all exhibit characteristic advantages, disadvantages, and implementation contexts. Understanding the difference between them is essential for building a flexible, secure, and scalable cloud strategy that will support business growth and innovation.

Single cloud

A single cloud setup environment is the one where all the cloud services – computing, storage, networking, databases, etc., are provided by a single cloud vendor, such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. It is easier to manage and offers tight service integration within a single environment. It is a single billing model, consistent performance, and a single support point. However, it also comes with a high degree of vendor lock-in, which cannot accommodate flexibility and cannot be converted to another provider.

Use case: These cloud environments are ideal for startups or small and medium-sized businesses that prioritize ease of use, speed of deployment, and lower initial complexity and cost.

Multi-cloud architecture

Multi-cloud architecture refers to using services from two or more public cloud providers. Each provider can be selected for a specific strength—one may offer better artificial intelligence tools, another may offer more reliable data storage, or another may offer better regional availability. Key benefits of this strategy include vendor lock-in avoidance, increased resilience, and performance optimization by selecting best-in-class services for each workload. However, it also complicates management, security, and infrastructure governance.

Use case: Enterprises with heightened requirements, such as compliance with regulations in different regions.

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud combines a private or local infrastructure and a public cloud. Unlike multi-cloud, where services are typically stand-alone from each other, hybrid clouds often have accumulated workloads that span both platforms. For example, confidential data can remain on local servers to preserve compliance, and fewer business-critical tasks are transferred to the public cloud. Hybrid configurations are most appropriate for organizations that need to merge old systems with new cloud technology. However, Integration can be expensive and technologically challenging. At the same time, many companies start with a hybrid cloud as a transitional step in migrating from legacy systems and gradually move to a multi-cloud as they modernize.

Use case: Common among government organizations and banks with strict regulatory requirements or old IT infrastructure.

Benefits of Multi-cloud in 2025

Multi-cloud technology approaches are becoming the building blocks of today's enterprise IT infrastructure. In the near future, organizations will transition to using multiple cloud platforms to ensure flexibility, resilience, performance, and strategic growth. The following are the most significant benefits that appeal to multi-cloud technology:

1. Vendor lock-in avoidance

One of the most compelling reasons for a multi-cloud strategy is the agility it provides. Being dependent on a single cloud provider may limit adaptability and make switching to another provider or adding new technologies difficult. Multi-cloud allows businesses to remain flexible by distributing workloads across several platforms, avoiding vendor lock-in and giving them more control over their infrastructure.

2. Cost optimization

Multi-cloud allows organizations to take advantage of price differences between cloud service providers. Businesses can save money and maximize their cloud service cost budget by choosing the least expensive or performance-optimized services for their workloads.

3. Best technologies access

Each cloud provider brings something unique to the table. AWS is unique with its enormous infrastructure and extensive suite of services, Azure with its business integration, and Google Cloud with its advanced data analytics and AI capabilities. A multi-cloud approach allows organizations to choose the best of what every provider offers, so they can be competitive and innovative without being locked into one provider's features.

4.Flexibility and customization

A multi-cloud approach enables organizations to combine services, architectures, and geographies. Flexibility enables companies to tailor their infrastructure to suit specific requirements, from performance and security to latency and geographical support.

5. Higher business resilience

Disruptions or outages from one cloud provider have the potential to severely impact an organization's operations. By distributing workloads among various platforms, the multi-cloud guarantees that even if one of the providers shuts down, the others can continue operations, minimizing the disruptions and guaranteeing smooth customer service.

6. Better compliance

With the creation of regional data protection laws such as GDPR and its counterparts worldwide, multi-cloud facilitates easy storage and processing of data in needed geographies. Organizations are free to choose providers based on where data is stored, which makes it easy to comply and improve governance.

7. Enhanced innovation

Since multi-cloud is usually built on open standards and cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes, organizations can more easily adopt new services or change to different providers as technology leads the way. This allows companies to stay at the forefront of technological innovation without being tied to specific cloud solutions.

8. Reduced risk from shadow IT

With a single-cloud configuration, employees can bypass the IT team to employ tools that are not offered by their provider, leading to shadow IT risks. Multi-cloud eliminates this risk by providing access to a greater array of approved applications and services, making it more secure, governed, and user-friendly.

Multi-cloud Trends 

As organizations seek flexibility and try to avoid dependence on a single vendor, multi-cloud environments have become a strategic choice for many. By combining services from different cloud providers, enterprises can tailor solutions to specific needs, but this also creates new challenges in security, management, and integration. The following trends show how companies are adapting to and optimizing the multi-cloud environment in their operations:

• Integrated platforms for managing across the multi-cloud

As more and more companies use multiple cloud providers to meet different technical, regulatory, and financial needs, the demand for centralized control mechanisms has grown exponentially. To address this multi-faceted problem, there has emerged integrated multi-cloud management platforms that provide a single portal through which IT teams can monitor and manage activity across multiple providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others. These platforms integrate many tools for resource provisioning, monitoring, billing, security, and policy enforcement to enable enterprises to provide consistency, reduce manual labor, and avoid configuration drift. They also support organizations in deploying infrastructure-as-code strategies that work effectively in any cloud and enable efficient and repeatable deployment.

A platform like CloudBolt can serve as a prime example of how to simplify and streamline cloud operations. Designed to support a wide range of cloud environments and hypervisors, it enables organizations to automate the importing and redeployment of legacy installations into modern cloud infrastructures. By using agentless technology, CloudBolt facilitates the seamless deployment of resource blueprints across diverse cloud ecosystems. In addition, its built-in modules for resource and cost management make it easier to maintain visibility and control as cloud usage scales.

The Scalr platform is a prime example of multi-cloud management, but with a greater focus on cost control and management. It offers self-service via a catalog, RBAC security, and a modern user interface that scales to thousands of users. The platform integrates well with third-party solutions, making it ideal for large virtual machine infrastructures that require scalability.

• AI-powered optimization and automation

Artificial intelligence is playing a transformative role in how organizations manage multi-cloud environments. With AI and machine learning, companies can predict resource usage patterns, automate scaling operations, and identify savings opportunities without human intervention. 

These systems are intelligent enough to constantly analyze workloads and make dynamic changes to cloud resources in order to achieve peak performance while avoiding wastage. For instance, AI is able to recognize idle virtual machines and suggest reducing or consolidating them. In addition, predictive analytics can help anticipate traffic spikes or downtime risks, enabling proactive adjustments of operations to maintain reliability. This level of automation improves operational efficiency and delivers significant financial benefits through better resource utilization.

• RAG-based generative AI in the cloud

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an advanced technique that enhances generative AI models by enabling them to acquire and integrate knowledge from various industry-specific sources in real-time. This technique allows large language models to leverage data stored across different providers in a multi-cloud environment, delivering more accurate and contextually relevant results. This is particularly valuable for businesses building intelligent assistants or knowledge management tools. 

For example, a customer support chatbot can request documents stored in Azure using models hosted on AWS. Cloud-based RAG architectures also support data privacy and security, ensuring that sensitive enterprise data remains in trusted environments.

•  Workload portability between clouds

One of the main reasons for the use of a multi-cloud strategy is to avoid vendor lock-in. Cloud portability allows organizations to shift workloads and data between various cloud providers natively with low rework. This enables businesses to quickly respond to pricing, performance, or compliance requirements changes. Technologies such as containerization (e.g., Docker) and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes are critical enablers, as they package applications to abstract the underlying infrastructure. Developers can deploy applications once and run them anywhere, whether in a private cloud, on a public provider, or at the edge. This approach also supports high availability by distributing workloads across regions and providers to ensure redundancy and fault tolerance.

• Zero Trust security in the cloud

In a multi-cloud world, traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer sufficient for protecting distributed data and applications. A zero-trust approach, which emphasizes the principle of "never trust, always verify" has become essential. In this model, every user, device, and application must be continuously authenticated and authorized, whether inside or outside the network. Applying Zero Trust in the cloud ensures that organizations adhere to a single security policy even when moving workloads between different environments. This involves network segmentation, identity-based access control implementation, and real-time threat detection systems based on artificial intelligence. This is particularly important as data and applications become increasingly distributed and threats become increasingly sophisticated.

• Development of cloud and hybrid applications

Today's application development leverages cloud concepts in terms of focus on scalability, modularity, and rapid deployment. In a multi-cloud scenario, cloud application development means creating applications that are not only optimized for the cloud, but also designed to transfer data between different cloud infrastructures. Developers employ microservices, APIs, and serverless computing to create agile applications that can be scaled independently without impacting the overall system. At the same time, hybrid cloud strategies are becoming more advanced, with applications moving between public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises environments. Enterprises are using hybrid architecture to keep sensitive data in the company while taking advantage of the scalability and innovation offered by public clouds.

• Cloud repatriation and workload redistribution

Although the cloud offers many advantages, some organizations believe that not all workloads are best suited for public cloud environments. As a result, cloud repatriation - the process of moving workloads back to private clouds or on-premises infrastructure is gaining popularity. Cost considerations, performance issues, or data sovereignty requirements often drive this trend. For example, workloads that require significant computing resources, such as artificial intelligence training or real-time analytics, may be more cost-effective when run on on-premises resources using specialized hardware. In addition, sensitive data subject to strict regulations may need to be stored in a specific jurisdiction. Workload redistribution allows organizations to choose the most appropriate environment for each use case, optimizing performance, costs, and compliance.

• Cloud strategies focused on sustainability

As businesses face increasing pressure from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals, sustainability is becoming a key factor in cloud technology strategy. Organizations are now evaluating cloud usage in terms of carbon emissions and energy efficiency. Multi-cloud configurations allow businesses to choose providers or data centers with the lowest environmental impact, leverage regions powered by renewable energy sources, and monitor their carbon footprint in the cloud with dedicated dashboards. Cloud sustainability software detects unused resources, accurately measures workloads, and implements more environmentally friendly coding practices. This follows a broader shift towards ethical use of technology and IT business operations in harmony with corporate sustainability initiatives.

• AR/VR cloud technologies

Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) apps, in 2025, will increasingly rely on cloud computing to deliver a glitch-free, high-quality experience. Such apps require enormous processing muscle to render 3D worlds and interactive items in real time — something that local devices, especially mobile ones, can rarely accomplish independently. Cloud rendering offloads this task to remote servers, allowing users to navigate high-end simulations without requiring special hardware. A multi-cloud setup ensures better global delivery, latency optimization, and resilience — which are essential for real-time AR/VR applications.This year, industries such as healthcare, education, manufacturing, and retail are adopting cloud-based AR/VR for purposes such as hands-on training, remote collaboration, and virtual product demonstrations. As the concept of the metaverse evolves, demand for cloud-based AR/VR will grow even more.

Conclusion

As cloud technologies evolve, businesses need to remain flexible and informed. Integrating artificial intelligence, edge computing, and industry-specific cloud solutions will continue to shape the cloud landscape, opening up new opportunities for innovation and efficiency gains. Adopting multi-cloud strategies is no longer a luxury but a necessity for organizations that want to succeed in 2025 and beyond. While complexity and cost management challenges remain, the benefits – greater flexibility, resilience, and access to best-in-class services are compelling reasons to explore this topic and implement cloud solutions in your business. Businesses that successfully navigate this transition will be well-positioned to lead the digital economy.