Tenet 9. Embrace an 80/20 approach over equal distribution - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Tenet 9. Embrace an 80/20 approach over equal distribution

How you distribute workloads across providers fundamentally determines your multicloud success. Many organizations mistakenly pursue equality in their cloud distribution, and attempt to spread workloads evenly across providers. This approach increases complexity without delivering proportional benefits. Equal distribution fragments your technical capabilities, dilutes your purchasing power, and creates unnecessary operational overhead. Teams struggle to develop deep expertise when they're forced to maintain competency across multiple platforms simultaneously.

The 80/20 approach delivers demonstrably better results than equal distribution across clouds. Concentrating 80% of your investment with one primary provider while selectively using others for specific capabilities creates a balanced strategy that reduces both cost and complexity. This concentrated approach accelerates innovation because your teams can develop deep expertise with your primary platform's advanced services. Your technical staff can become specialists in one architecture instead of maintaining surface-level knowledge across multiple environments. When engineers master one platform, they build more efficiently, troubleshoot faster, and implement more sophisticated solutions.

Companies that follow the 80/20 approach typically report better talent retention because their teams develop valuable, marketable expertise instead of being stretched thin across multiple technologies. This concentrated strategy also helps simplify security management by limiting the complexity of different security models across providers. The primary cloud receives most of your investment in security tools, monitoring solutions, and operational processes. This creates a stronger security foundation than what's possible with equally divided resources.

Our guidance:

  • Select a primary cloud provider that aligns with most of your business and technical requirements. This provider should support at least 80% of your workloads and become the foundation of your cloud strategy. Focus your training investments, architectural standards, and operational processes on maximizing value from this primary platform.

  • Develop clear criteria for workloads that warrant placement on secondary clouds. These criteria should focus on specific business value that cannot be achieved on your primary provider. Resist placing workloads on secondary clouds simply to maintain spending equity or artificial balance between providers.

  • Structure your enterprise agreements to reflect your 80/20 approach. Negotiate volume discounts with your primary provider based on concentrated spending, and maintain flexibility with secondary providers for specific use cases. This approach maximizes your purchasing leverage and typically results in better overall pricing than dividing your spend equally.

  • Align your talent strategy with your 80/20 approach. Invest in developing deep expertise with your primary provider's services while maintaining sufficient knowledge of secondary platforms to support specific workloads. This focused talent strategy improves productivity, accelerates delivery, and reduces the risk of critical skill gaps.

  • Measure the business outcomes of your multicloud strategy regularly. Track metrics that demonstrate the value gained from each provider and adjust your distribution if necessary. The goal isn't to avoid multicloud entirely but to implement it strategically where specific workloads truly benefit from capabilities that are unique to other providers.