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You’re likely managing multiple cloud platforms, but with that comes a significant challenge: how do you make sure it all works seamlessly?
Precedence Research predicts the multi-cloud management market will explode, growing from USD 16.02 billion in 2025 to USD 147 billion by 2034, with an annual growth rate of 27.94%.As more organizations adopt multi-cloud strategies, the complexity of managing various services, platforms, and costs is becoming a real headache.
McKinsey found that even though 65% of companies have over 20% of their workloads in the cloud, many still struggle to fully optimize their cloud environments. This results in millions lost to underutilized resources, misconfigurations, and firefighting.
As an engineering leader, you're not just dealing with technical issues, but you’re also balancing cost, performance, and strategy. This is why we’ve put together this guide to outline what multi-cloud management really takes, and explain how modern tools, especially autonomous platforms, are helping businesses better manage their cloud ecosystems.
Most enterprises today are multi-cloud by accident, not by design. Acquisitions, regional regulations, shadow IT, and team preferences often leave organizations juggling AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes clusters, and SaaS services simultaneously.
Each of these environments has its own APIs, billing formats, compliance requirements, and security models, which makes centralized management a formidable challenge.
Take, for example, the task of updating security settings across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Each platform requires different steps, interfaces, and processes, creating significant friction. Managing these environments separately leads to increased complexity, misconfigurations, and inefficiencies.
Multi-cloud management addresses this challenge by offering a streamlined approach to coordinate and control all environments from a single location, creating a unified operational model for engineering, finance, and security teams.
Multi-cloud management is the discipline, and increasingly, the tooling that allows engineering leaders to:
The catch is that most tools only go halfway: they surface the problems, but leave humans to make sense of them and take action. And humans, especially in high-scale cloud environments, are already running on fumes.
It’s important to understand the distinction between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, because managing them requires different approaches.
By the end of 2025, Forrester expects fewer than 60% of cloud customers to rely solely on hyperscaler-native security, with 40% adopting specialist platforms instead. That shift highlights a broader reality: enterprises need flexibility and resilience that no single provider can deliver on its own.
A multi-cloud strategy can deliver:
A multi-cloud strategy reduces the friction inherent in managing disparate cloud environments. But the real value comes when tools can autonomously take the necessary actions to optimize these environments, reducing overhead and ensuring efficiency across the board.
Solving vendor lock-in with multiple providers comes at a cost of its own. Without a plan, many enterprises end up with spiraling bills, fragmented governance, and more operational drag than they started with.
The main hurdles we’ve seen include:
These challenges explain why enterprises are increasingly turning to multi-cloud management platforms not just for visibility, but for automation, cost control, and governance at scale.
A multi-cloud management platform is software that gives enterprises a single way to operate across multiple cloud providers. Instead of logging into AWS for one workload, Azure for another, and Google Cloud for analytics, these platforms create a unified control layer.
These platforms connect to each provider’s APIs, pulling in data on usage, spend, and performance. They normalize inconsistencies in tagging, billing cycles, and telemetry, making the sprawl easier to interpret.
Aggregation and normalization of data are necessary, but they aren't enough to manage a cloud environment effectively. As things evolve in real-time, you can’t afford to wait for someone to manually interpret a report and take action. Platforms need to be able to not only aggregate but also act on that data, scaling resources, rightsizing, or optimizing costs as conditions change.
Just because you can see a problem doesn’t mean you’re set up to solve it. The key to truly managing a multi-cloud environment lies in automation, and that's where most tools fall short.
Forrester's 2024 Automation Survey reveals that organizations are increasingly adopting automation tools to manage multi-cloud environments, aiming to reduce manual interventions and improve efficiency.
Multi-cloud management platforms offer:
For CIOs and engineering leaders, the question is no longer whether to adopt a multi-cloud management platform—it’s which one.
In 2024, 89% of organizations adopted multi-cloud strategies, and 68% of organizations are planning to increase cloud spend (Gartner). With the rise in cloud spending, an autonomous platform will be critical in adapting resources to real-time changes and keeping your operations running efficiently.
Here are the top platforms to watch in 2025, starting with the one designed to handle the chaos autonomously.
Managing multi-cloud is complex: hundreds of services, dozens of apps, and endless billing cycles across providers. Traditional tools give dashboards and alerts, but humans can’t keep up with the scale or speed of change.
Sedai takes a different path. Instead of waiting for engineers to react, it acts autonomously:
This real-time intelligence is what sets Sedai apart. Where most platforms show you what’s wrong, Sedai actually fixes it, adjusting commitments, rightsizing resources, and tuning workloads without manual input.
For enterprises, this means:
Best for: Enterprises managing large-scale, multi-cloud environments that need real-time optimization without constant manual adjustments.
Why Sedai Stands Out
Unlike most platforms that stop at visibility or orchestration, Sedai self-driving cloud closes the loop, operating as a self-optimizing layer that keeps your cloud efficient, secure, and cost-effective.
IBM’s stack pairs Turbonomic for automated performance/cost optimization with Cloudability (Apptio) for FinOps reporting and allocation. Turbonomic can automate actions like pausing idle workloads and rightsizing to improve spend and performance. IBM acquired Apptio in 2023, bringing Cloudability’s cost allocation and reservation coverage into the portfolio.
NCM Cost Governance (formerly Beam) gives unified visibility and chargeback across Nutanix on-prem plus AWS, Azure, and GCP, with policy-driven optimization and rightsizing. Unlike many cloud-native tools, NCM gives IT leaders a way to unify on-prem and public cloud governance. It combines automation, cost visibility, and policy enforcement into a single layer.
VMware brings one of the most comprehensive portfolios in the space. CloudHealth is widely adopted for FinOps and cost visibility. Tanzu modernizes applications with Kubernetes. Aria Cost and Cloud Foundation Automation extend VMware’s control to hybrid and multi-cloud setups.
OpenShift has become the enterprise standard for Kubernetes orchestration. It provides developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, and governance capabilities to manage containerized apps across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem environments.
While OpenShift focuses on Kubernetes, Ansible brings powerful infrastructure automation across hybrid and multi-cloud setups. Engineering teams use it for repetitive tasks, configuration consistency, and infrastructure orchestration.
Morpheus provides a single platform for managing hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-prem environments. It helps enterprises with cloud resource provisioning, orchestration, and governance. Morpheus integrates with platforms like VMware, OpenStack, Azure, AWS, and more, ensuring a consistent operational experience across clouds.
CloudBolt is designed to provide visibility and governance across hybrid cloud environments, including multi-cloud architectures. It focuses on cost visibility, budgeting, forecasting, and resource allocation across AWS, Azure, and GCP. With its self-service provisioning capabilities, it allows IT teams to maintain control while giving developers flexibility.
Terraform is a widely used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that enables teams to provision, manage, and scale cloud resources across multiple cloud providers. Its declarative configuration language allows users to define cloud infrastructure in code, making it ideal for managing environments that span AWS, Azure, GCP, and others.
CloudZero focuses on providing real-time cloud cost visibility tailored to engineering teams. By breaking down cloud spending at the product, team, and feature level, CloudZero enables teams to align cloud costs with business goals. It automates cost allocation, budgeting, and anomaly detection, making it ideal for companies that want actionable insights into their cloud spend.
When we talk with SRE and DevOps teams, one theme comes up again and again: the time lost to wrestling with cloud complexity. Too many hours go into stitching together visibility, policing costs, and trying to make sure security rules apply equally across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.
The right platform should make this mess easier to manage without adding more overhead.
Your platform should run cleanly across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. We’ve seen how frustrating it is when one provider becomes the center of gravity and everything else requires workarounds. True compatibility avoids lock-in and centralizes management without breaking existing setups.
Dashboards alone don’t scale. If the platform stops at surfacing metrics and requires manual intervention to act, it simply shifts the burden to already stretched engineering teams.
What we’ve found most useful are platforms that automate actions in real time, adjusting resources when demand changes or shutting down underutilized capacity without waiting for human intervention.
Sedai, for example, has taken this direction by focusing on autonomous optimization rather than just surfacing alerts. That kind of automation is what allows teams to spend less time firefighting and more time improving reliability.
We’ve seen finance and engineering teams burn days reconciling cost reports that arrive weeks after the fact. A solid MCMP should give you real-time cost tracking, forecasting, and anomaly detection so you can address spend patterns before they snowball.
Your MCMP must include strong IAM, data encryption, and ensure compliance with relevant standards (SOC 2, HIPAA, etc.). It’s critical to enforce policies consistently across clouds without creating security gaps.
As your cloud needs grow, the MCMP should scale without reconfiguration. The platform must be able to handle increasing workloads and adapt to new cloud providers, regions, and services.
Tools need to be intuitive and integrated into your existing workflows. Choose a platform that offers clear dashboards for visibility, CI/CD integration, and developer tools like CLI and APIs. An overly complex tool can create more problems than it solves, so focus on ease of use.
The right MCMP should make multi-cloud simpler, cheaper, and more secure. Sedai does this with autonomous optimization, removing the manual guesswork from cloud management.
Managing a multi-cloud environment is extremely difficult. With hundreds of individual services, dozens of applications, and countless cloud bills, the complexity can quickly spiral out of control. The only way to effectively manage this chaos is through an autonomous platform that can act without manual intervention, eliminating unnecessary costs and remediating issues in real-time.
This is where platforms like Sedai excel. By learning how your services and applications behave and responding to changes automatically, Sedai ensures your resources are always aligned with your business needs.
Join us and start automating your multi-cloud operations with Sedai’s autonomous platform.
Enterprises are adopting multi-cloud strategies to prevent vendor lock-in, improve redundancy, optimize costs, and access specialized services from different cloud providers. It also offers flexibility for handling varied workloads across different environments.
No, AWS is not a multi-cloud platform. It is a single cloud provider. Multi-cloud refers to using multiple providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) simultaneously to leverage the unique strengths of each.
While both hybrid and multi-cloud involve multiple cloud environments, hybrid cloud specifically combines private and public clouds, often with seamless data and workload integration between the two. Multi-cloud, on the other hand, involves using multiple public cloud providers.
Managing multi-cloud environments introduces challenges like complexity in integration, inconsistent service offerings across clouds, managing data security and compliance, monitoring performance across multiple platforms, and ensuring cost optimization.
September 8, 2025
September 12, 2025
You’re likely managing multiple cloud platforms, but with that comes a significant challenge: how do you make sure it all works seamlessly?
Precedence Research predicts the multi-cloud management market will explode, growing from USD 16.02 billion in 2025 to USD 147 billion by 2034, with an annual growth rate of 27.94%.As more organizations adopt multi-cloud strategies, the complexity of managing various services, platforms, and costs is becoming a real headache.
McKinsey found that even though 65% of companies have over 20% of their workloads in the cloud, many still struggle to fully optimize their cloud environments. This results in millions lost to underutilized resources, misconfigurations, and firefighting.
As an engineering leader, you're not just dealing with technical issues, but you’re also balancing cost, performance, and strategy. This is why we’ve put together this guide to outline what multi-cloud management really takes, and explain how modern tools, especially autonomous platforms, are helping businesses better manage their cloud ecosystems.
Most enterprises today are multi-cloud by accident, not by design. Acquisitions, regional regulations, shadow IT, and team preferences often leave organizations juggling AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes clusters, and SaaS services simultaneously.
Each of these environments has its own APIs, billing formats, compliance requirements, and security models, which makes centralized management a formidable challenge.
Take, for example, the task of updating security settings across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Each platform requires different steps, interfaces, and processes, creating significant friction. Managing these environments separately leads to increased complexity, misconfigurations, and inefficiencies.
Multi-cloud management addresses this challenge by offering a streamlined approach to coordinate and control all environments from a single location, creating a unified operational model for engineering, finance, and security teams.
Multi-cloud management is the discipline, and increasingly, the tooling that allows engineering leaders to:
The catch is that most tools only go halfway: they surface the problems, but leave humans to make sense of them and take action. And humans, especially in high-scale cloud environments, are already running on fumes.
It’s important to understand the distinction between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, because managing them requires different approaches.
By the end of 2025, Forrester expects fewer than 60% of cloud customers to rely solely on hyperscaler-native security, with 40% adopting specialist platforms instead. That shift highlights a broader reality: enterprises need flexibility and resilience that no single provider can deliver on its own.
A multi-cloud strategy can deliver:
A multi-cloud strategy reduces the friction inherent in managing disparate cloud environments. But the real value comes when tools can autonomously take the necessary actions to optimize these environments, reducing overhead and ensuring efficiency across the board.
Solving vendor lock-in with multiple providers comes at a cost of its own. Without a plan, many enterprises end up with spiraling bills, fragmented governance, and more operational drag than they started with.
The main hurdles we’ve seen include:
These challenges explain why enterprises are increasingly turning to multi-cloud management platforms not just for visibility, but for automation, cost control, and governance at scale.
A multi-cloud management platform is software that gives enterprises a single way to operate across multiple cloud providers. Instead of logging into AWS for one workload, Azure for another, and Google Cloud for analytics, these platforms create a unified control layer.
These platforms connect to each provider’s APIs, pulling in data on usage, spend, and performance. They normalize inconsistencies in tagging, billing cycles, and telemetry, making the sprawl easier to interpret.
Aggregation and normalization of data are necessary, but they aren't enough to manage a cloud environment effectively. As things evolve in real-time, you can’t afford to wait for someone to manually interpret a report and take action. Platforms need to be able to not only aggregate but also act on that data, scaling resources, rightsizing, or optimizing costs as conditions change.
Just because you can see a problem doesn’t mean you’re set up to solve it. The key to truly managing a multi-cloud environment lies in automation, and that's where most tools fall short.
Forrester's 2024 Automation Survey reveals that organizations are increasingly adopting automation tools to manage multi-cloud environments, aiming to reduce manual interventions and improve efficiency.
Multi-cloud management platforms offer:
For CIOs and engineering leaders, the question is no longer whether to adopt a multi-cloud management platform—it’s which one.
In 2024, 89% of organizations adopted multi-cloud strategies, and 68% of organizations are planning to increase cloud spend (Gartner). With the rise in cloud spending, an autonomous platform will be critical in adapting resources to real-time changes and keeping your operations running efficiently.
Here are the top platforms to watch in 2025, starting with the one designed to handle the chaos autonomously.
Managing multi-cloud is complex: hundreds of services, dozens of apps, and endless billing cycles across providers. Traditional tools give dashboards and alerts, but humans can’t keep up with the scale or speed of change.
Sedai takes a different path. Instead of waiting for engineers to react, it acts autonomously:
This real-time intelligence is what sets Sedai apart. Where most platforms show you what’s wrong, Sedai actually fixes it, adjusting commitments, rightsizing resources, and tuning workloads without manual input.
For enterprises, this means:
Best for: Enterprises managing large-scale, multi-cloud environments that need real-time optimization without constant manual adjustments.
Why Sedai Stands Out
Unlike most platforms that stop at visibility or orchestration, Sedai self-driving cloud closes the loop, operating as a self-optimizing layer that keeps your cloud efficient, secure, and cost-effective.
IBM’s stack pairs Turbonomic for automated performance/cost optimization with Cloudability (Apptio) for FinOps reporting and allocation. Turbonomic can automate actions like pausing idle workloads and rightsizing to improve spend and performance. IBM acquired Apptio in 2023, bringing Cloudability’s cost allocation and reservation coverage into the portfolio.
NCM Cost Governance (formerly Beam) gives unified visibility and chargeback across Nutanix on-prem plus AWS, Azure, and GCP, with policy-driven optimization and rightsizing. Unlike many cloud-native tools, NCM gives IT leaders a way to unify on-prem and public cloud governance. It combines automation, cost visibility, and policy enforcement into a single layer.
VMware brings one of the most comprehensive portfolios in the space. CloudHealth is widely adopted for FinOps and cost visibility. Tanzu modernizes applications with Kubernetes. Aria Cost and Cloud Foundation Automation extend VMware’s control to hybrid and multi-cloud setups.
OpenShift has become the enterprise standard for Kubernetes orchestration. It provides developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, and governance capabilities to manage containerized apps across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem environments.
While OpenShift focuses on Kubernetes, Ansible brings powerful infrastructure automation across hybrid and multi-cloud setups. Engineering teams use it for repetitive tasks, configuration consistency, and infrastructure orchestration.
Morpheus provides a single platform for managing hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-prem environments. It helps enterprises with cloud resource provisioning, orchestration, and governance. Morpheus integrates with platforms like VMware, OpenStack, Azure, AWS, and more, ensuring a consistent operational experience across clouds.
CloudBolt is designed to provide visibility and governance across hybrid cloud environments, including multi-cloud architectures. It focuses on cost visibility, budgeting, forecasting, and resource allocation across AWS, Azure, and GCP. With its self-service provisioning capabilities, it allows IT teams to maintain control while giving developers flexibility.
Terraform is a widely used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that enables teams to provision, manage, and scale cloud resources across multiple cloud providers. Its declarative configuration language allows users to define cloud infrastructure in code, making it ideal for managing environments that span AWS, Azure, GCP, and others.
CloudZero focuses on providing real-time cloud cost visibility tailored to engineering teams. By breaking down cloud spending at the product, team, and feature level, CloudZero enables teams to align cloud costs with business goals. It automates cost allocation, budgeting, and anomaly detection, making it ideal for companies that want actionable insights into their cloud spend.
When we talk with SRE and DevOps teams, one theme comes up again and again: the time lost to wrestling with cloud complexity. Too many hours go into stitching together visibility, policing costs, and trying to make sure security rules apply equally across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.
The right platform should make this mess easier to manage without adding more overhead.
Your platform should run cleanly across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. We’ve seen how frustrating it is when one provider becomes the center of gravity and everything else requires workarounds. True compatibility avoids lock-in and centralizes management without breaking existing setups.
Dashboards alone don’t scale. If the platform stops at surfacing metrics and requires manual intervention to act, it simply shifts the burden to already stretched engineering teams.
What we’ve found most useful are platforms that automate actions in real time, adjusting resources when demand changes or shutting down underutilized capacity without waiting for human intervention.
Sedai, for example, has taken this direction by focusing on autonomous optimization rather than just surfacing alerts. That kind of automation is what allows teams to spend less time firefighting and more time improving reliability.
We’ve seen finance and engineering teams burn days reconciling cost reports that arrive weeks after the fact. A solid MCMP should give you real-time cost tracking, forecasting, and anomaly detection so you can address spend patterns before they snowball.
Your MCMP must include strong IAM, data encryption, and ensure compliance with relevant standards (SOC 2, HIPAA, etc.). It’s critical to enforce policies consistently across clouds without creating security gaps.
As your cloud needs grow, the MCMP should scale without reconfiguration. The platform must be able to handle increasing workloads and adapt to new cloud providers, regions, and services.
Tools need to be intuitive and integrated into your existing workflows. Choose a platform that offers clear dashboards for visibility, CI/CD integration, and developer tools like CLI and APIs. An overly complex tool can create more problems than it solves, so focus on ease of use.
The right MCMP should make multi-cloud simpler, cheaper, and more secure. Sedai does this with autonomous optimization, removing the manual guesswork from cloud management.
Managing a multi-cloud environment is extremely difficult. With hundreds of individual services, dozens of applications, and countless cloud bills, the complexity can quickly spiral out of control. The only way to effectively manage this chaos is through an autonomous platform that can act without manual intervention, eliminating unnecessary costs and remediating issues in real-time.
This is where platforms like Sedai excel. By learning how your services and applications behave and responding to changes automatically, Sedai ensures your resources are always aligned with your business needs.
Join us and start automating your multi-cloud operations with Sedai’s autonomous platform.
Enterprises are adopting multi-cloud strategies to prevent vendor lock-in, improve redundancy, optimize costs, and access specialized services from different cloud providers. It also offers flexibility for handling varied workloads across different environments.
No, AWS is not a multi-cloud platform. It is a single cloud provider. Multi-cloud refers to using multiple providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) simultaneously to leverage the unique strengths of each.
While both hybrid and multi-cloud involve multiple cloud environments, hybrid cloud specifically combines private and public clouds, often with seamless data and workload integration between the two. Multi-cloud, on the other hand, involves using multiple public cloud providers.
Managing multi-cloud environments introduces challenges like complexity in integration, inconsistent service offerings across clouds, managing data security and compliance, monitoring performance across multiple platforms, and ensuring cost optimization.
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