Should you migrate from a single cloud to multi-cloud? A practical checklist
Multi-cloud sounds like risk reduction. Often it's risk addition. Here's a checklist — drawn from real DivergeiX engagements — to decide if you actually need it.
“Multi-cloud” gets pitched as inevitable. The reality: most companies that go multi-cloud end up with two clouds run badly instead of one cloud run well. Here’s a checklist we use with clients to decide.
Reasons to stay single-cloud
- Your team is small (under ~30 engineers). Operational overhead of two clouds dominates any benefit.
- Your application uses managed services heavily (Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, Cognito). Re-architecting these for portability costs more than the lock-in.
- Your compliance regime accepts single-cloud (most do — even RBI is fine if your DR plan is documented).
- Your spend is under USD 50k/month. Vendor leverage is mostly theoretical at this scale.
Reasons to seriously consider multi-cloud
- Regulatory requirement. Some sectors and geographies mandate vendor diversity (some EU public-sector contracts; some Indian financial regulations).
- Acquired entity on a different cloud. Forcing migration into the parent stack is sometimes the worst option, especially if the acquisition runs autonomously.
- Specific service is dramatically better on a different cloud. Vertex AI, BigQuery, or specific Azure AI Services may justify a second cloud for one workload, while keeping the rest single-cloud.
- Team is large and mature. 100+ engineers, mature platform team, working CI/CD across clouds. Operational overhead is absorbable.
What “multi-cloud done right” actually looks like
Not: “everything runs in both clouds.” That’s a fantasy.
Yes:
- One cloud is the primary. The other handles a specific workload (e.g. AI/ML on GCP, everything else on AWS).
- Shared identity (Okta, Azure AD) so engineers don’t manage two sets of credentials.
- Shared observability (Datadog, Grafana Cloud) so you have one pane of glass.
- IaC discipline (Terraform with clear module boundaries per cloud).
- Network connectivity (interconnect or VPN) only where actually needed.
How to decide
Score yourself across the eight points above. If you’re hitting 5+ of the “stay single-cloud” reasons, you probably should. If you’re hitting 3+ “go multi-cloud” reasons and have a 50+ engineer team, it’s worth a serious architecture review.
We do these reviews as a 2-week engagement: gap analysis, target-state architecture, migration plan, cost modeling. If you’d like one, reach out.
