27 February 2025

The vital role of connectivity in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud success

Multi-cloud connectivity e-commerce

According to an IDC infobrief, businesses are finally getting comfortable in the cloud.

In the next two years, the majority of the organizations surveyed expect to “have broadly implemented a substantial cloud team that is proactively managed, resourced well, and clearly driving business growth”.  

In other words, they’re reaching cloud maturity. In fact, the report reveals over three-quarters (76%) of enterprises are either already using public clouds, or plan to do so in the next 12 months.    

There is a push towards multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies 

As they move towards cloud maturity, enterprises are increasingly embracing multi-cloud strategies, where they work with a range of different public and private cloud providers. They’re also adopting hybrid-cloud setups where they combine both cloud environments and on-premise data centers. According to the Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report, 89% of enterprises already use multi-cloud to some degree, while 79% have a hybrid-cloud setup.  

This push towards multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud continues to intensify. The IDC report reveals almost half (43%) of businesses see adopting a multi-cloud strategy as one of their top priorities when it comes to key modernization and transformation initiatives over the next two years. The current impetus behind multi-cloud is a combination of increasing capacity for running distributed enterprise applications (aka edge computing), and supporting the growing integration of AI, particularly generative AI.

Of course there are many other reasons why businesses might pursue a multi-cloud strategy. They may want to reduce the risk of cloud concentration which comes from over-reliance on a single provider. They may also want the freedom to use the best possible cloud environment for each workload, whether that’s of one the leading clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, or a specialist regional cloud provider.  

The role of connectivity can’t be overlooked  

Despite the widespread adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud setups, almost three-quarters (72%) of businesses say they have difficulties realizing the full value of the cloud when they’re deploying workloads across different providers. This is often because they overlook the connectivity implications of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud setups, including:  

  • The impact of increased data volumes on latency and transfer speeds, when using unreliable tunnel-based network solutions with limited bandwidth.
  • The need for traffic management and monitoring capabilities.
  • The growing cost associated with egress charges, which are common over the public Internet.
  • The need for efficient intercloud and intracloud connectivity to avoid backhauling cloud traffic to a data center and then back to another cloud service provider.
  • The requirement to protect data flows to ensure both security and compliance.

Managing traffic across multiple cloud environments requires sophisticated network solutions, and 51% of businesses are already planning to deploy multi-cloud networking. So, what should enterprises be looking for in a networking partner?  

Choosing the right networking partner  

As they move toward multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud setups, businesses need to work with sophisticated network solutions that address these connectivity implications. Partners need to offer low latency, reliable performance, and efficient data management.  

A distributed cloud exchange platform and routing service with secure connectivity can support businesses with their multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy and can offer:  

  • A direct and private high performance data exchange between cloud environments.
  • Improved application performance due to reduced latency.
  • Built-in data protection and compliance.
  • A private connection between on-premise infrastructure and public clouds.
  • Carrier-grade infrastructure that enables fast and effective collaboration.
  • Robust service level agreements (SLAs) to avoid operational inefficiencies.

Network connectivity is essential for any successful digital transformation initiative, and should be a top priority for enterprises on their multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud journey. Without reliable, secure, high-performance networking at the heart of their strategies, organizations will struggle to realize the benefits of the cloud.

To find out more about why enterprises need a robust network infrastructure to support multi- and hybrid-cloud setups, take a look at the IDC infobrief, How connectivity will help enable the oop IT trends.