Proven practices for developing a multicloud strategy
Tom Godden and Ellie Tamari, Amazon Web Services
September 2025 (document history)
Organizations today face conflicting messages about multicloud adoption. Some advise against it entirely, while others claim that everyone is switching to a multicloud environment. The reality lies between these extremes: Legitimate reasons exist both for and against multicloud strategies, and success depends on balancing potential business value against inherent complexity and risk.
At AWS, our commitment to interoperability is a key reason many customers choose our platform. We believe in giving you the freedom to innovate wherever your workloads are and empowering you to choose the technology that best suits your needs. At AWS, we have been at the forefront of developing solutions that enable you to build and deploy applications in any environment. This customer-centric approach is fundamental to the AWS Cloud, which is trusted by millions of customers worldwide.
We understand that customers need cloud platforms that work seamlessly with both existing tools and future technology choices. You shouldn't have to rebuild everything when you add capabilities from another provider. Your cloud should help you connect, secure, and manage workloads across environments without forcing you to become an expert in every platform. AWS builds connection points directly into its services to help you operate effectively, whether your strategy is to use AWS exclusively or to follow a selective multicloud approach.
We recognize that every organization has unique business requirements that drive their cloud strategy decisions. Whether you're running workloads primarily on AWS, running them across multiple clouds, or using AWS as part of a broader multicloud architecture, we're committed to helping you succeed. AWS delivers the depth and breadth of tooling and capabilities to help you build, migrate, and operate with greater ease and speed, wherever your workloads reside. AWS tools simplify management across providers while maximizing the performance and value of your cloud investments.
This paper focuses on proven tenets for succeeding with a multicloud strategy, including
when and where a multicloud approach makes sense and how AWS helps enterprises succeed
with their multicloud strategies. It provides prescriptive guidance to help executives make
informed strategy and decision-making choices related to multicloud adoption. This paper
doesn't offer a technical, in-depth discussion of multicloud implementations. For technical
implementation support and assistance with your specific challenges, we recommend that you
work
with your AWS solutions architect
This paper presents nine proven tenets for multicloud success based on our experiences with AWS enterprise customers. Each tenet addresses a critical aspect of multicloud strategy, from aligning business goals to security implementation. By applying these principles, organizations can navigate multicloud complexity with confidence.
