Multicloud Connectivity: Why Your Network Is Becoming the Bottleneck

Multicloud is the norm, cross-cloud the next stage

A company is said to have a multicloud strategy as soon as it uses more than one public cloud provider. In practice, this has now become the rule: the clear majority of companies running hybrid cloud operations use several public cloud services.

The reasons are mostly functional. A CRM runs where it was historically set up. Analytics and AI workloads move to wherever the platform offers the better services. Each cloud takes on what it does best.

A number of organisations are now going one step further and distributing individual applications or workloads across several clouds, a cross-cloud approach. The benefit is twofold: the application remains available if one platform fails, and price differences between providers can be exploited dynamically. The prerequisite, however, is that the distributed components can communicate with each other with minimal delay.

Why classic network architectures reach their limits

Multicloud environments generate continuous east-west traffic between the platforms, for example when an e-commerce application constantly synchronises with CRM and ERP systems. It is precisely this traffic that traditional network concepts serve poorly.

Hub-and-spoke architectures route cloud-to-cloud traffic via a central node, usually the company’s own data centre. This backhauling creates latency that becomes immediately noticeable in latency-sensitive applications, in application performance as well as in user perception. What multicloud environments need instead are direct paths: between the clouds themselves and between the cloud and on-premises resources. For cross-cloud scenarios, this is not an optimisation, but a basic requirement.

Almost all hyperscalers offer dedicated connections between company sites and the cloud. Cloud onramps for DIA, Ethernet or leased line connections are well established. Direct connections between the cloud platforms themselves, on the other hand, are much rarer, and their availability varies considerably by region and provider.

The obvious way out, VPN tunnels between the clouds, is rarely viable: costs rise with volume, and the available bandwidth is often not enough for productive data flows. What remains is a patchwork of individual services from different providers, each procured on a case-by-case basis. That works until the sum of the individual solutions itself becomes the problem.

What fragmentation really costs in operations

Every cloud platform brings its own network and security model: its own tools, its own concepts, its own know-how. With each additional platform, this effort does not grow linearly, but disproportionately. IT teams then manage parallel worlds that can neither be automated together nor monitored uniformly.

The consequences are measurable. Only about half of companies describe routing traffic across several cloud providers as straightforward, and load balancing looks hardly any better. In concrete terms, three cost blocks arise:

• Operating effort and lack of consistency due to parallel tool landscapes for each platform
• Blind spots in monitoring that make bottlenecks visible too late
• Inconsistent security policies, because each platform uses its own policy models
• More difficult compliance obligations under GDPR, NIS2 and industry-specific requirements

Without end-to-end transparency across all connections, troubleshooting becomes detective work. Capacities are sized incorrectly, and cost optimisation remains guesswork instead of control.

Multicloud networking instead of many individual solutions

Multicloud networking platforms address exactly this point. They connect all cloud environments directly with each other and with on-premises resources, and make these connections manageable via a common control layer. In practice, this means: all sites of a corporate WAN reach the cloud via a central transit gateway, while the clouds are directly connected to each other. Unnecessary backhauling is eliminated.

Many of these platforms are based on SD-WAN. The approach reduces complexity by unifying the entire network infrastructure and bringing together a wide range of connection types: DIA, business internet, Ethernet and mobile via central control. Traffic is automatically routed by application priority, without rules having to be maintained separately for each site.

Equally important is end-to-end visibility across all connections. Faults can be isolated faster, capacities adjusted proactively, problems solved before users notice them, and costs assessed reliably instead of overprovisioning. A uniform, software-defined environment also reduces the error rate in configurations and enables redundant paths with automatic failover.

Security becomes enforceable instead of fragmented

The security dimension weighs heaviest. Where each platform uses its own policy models, uniform security policies can hardly be enforced, and misconfigurations go undetected. More than half of companies consider securing cloud environments more demanding than securing classic on-premises infrastructure anyway. Each additional platform further enlarges the attack surface, which is why multi-cloud security belongs in the architecture decision and not in follow-up work.

A standardised architecture creates the prerequisite for a consistent level of security across the entire network. Vulnerabilities and misconfigurations become visible, attacks are detected earlier, and compliance evidence becomes much easier.

Zero Trust and SASE concepts build on this: instead of one-time authentication at the perimeter, every access is checked continuously. This considerably limits the damage should an attacker ever gain a foothold.

What an integrated multicloud approach delivers

The result is a network environment that works consistently regardless of location and cloud provider and is prepared for future cloud projects instead of slowing them down. Specifically on five levels:

• Performance: low latency for demanding cloud applications, no unnecessary backhauling
• Reliability: redundant paths, automatic failover, end-to-end transparency
• Security: uniform policies, Zero Trust and SASE integration, reliable compliance evidence
• Operations: central management of all connections instead of parallel tool landscapes
• Scalability: new clouds and sites can be added without breaking the architecture

The order remains decisive. An overlay can only control as well as the underlay allows. Anyone who introduces SASE and SD-WAN without sizing the underlying lines and cloud onramps merely shifts the problem one level up.