Strategies for high availability, disaster recovery, and performance in multi-cloud deployments

Multi-cloud has gained a strong foothold in the IT landscape. However, interest in multi-cloud is often driven by a combination of frustration with a "single cloud" strategy — whether real or perceived — and excitement about the possibilities of a multi-cloud strategy. But what is a multi-cloud strategy, what are the primary use cases, and how do organizations go about implementing it to reap the benefits while mitigating the associated risks?

A multi-cloud strategy is an approach employed to leverage the services and capabilities of more than one public cloud provider. While many organizations depend upon a single cloud provider for capacity, services, and capabilities to meet their deployment needs, multi-cloud is often equally appealing and interesting in that it can relieve single-cloud provider dependency and risk, as well as utilizing cloud vendors whose services may be better matched for a given business function or application. So-called "cloudbursts" — defined bursts of activity or processing associated with particular applications — are also suited to multi-cloud strategies in that brief additional capacity requirements can be met far less expensively on a temporary basis using public cloud than by setting up and deploying an enterprise data center. Multi-cloud does require some level of competence and expertise in managing workload movement across providers. As with most situations entailing competing priorities, using multiple clouds generates both opportunity and management complexity (Doe et al., 2025; Johnson et al., 2025; Lee, 2025).

Despite the increasing interest in multi-cloud strategies and the rapid growth in multi-cloud deployments, the public multi-cloud ecosystem lacks the level of interoperability that might be expected, much less desired, at this stage in its evolution. As a result, organizations that embark upon a multi-cloud strategy require both a clear-eyed understanding of the opportunities associated with using multiple clouds as well as the challenges and complexities. In this chapter, we explore the opportunities, challenges, and complexities associated with multi-cloud strategies in depth (Smith, 2025; Thompson et al., 2025).