Multicloud was supposed to be the antidote to cloud vendor lock-in. We were promised agility, resilience, and freedom. We were going to be able to pick the best services across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
However, most of us found ourselves trapped in a fragmented and inefficient environment.
Consider this: 75% of organizations report significant cloud waste, with an average of 32% of their cloud budgets going unused or mismanaged. What was supposed to drive flexibility has instead created:
- Bloated costs
- Overlapping infrastructure
- Stress for overloaded engineering teams
All because they’re trying to maintain visibility across disparate environments.
The bottom line: “Doing AWS + Azure + GCP” does not equal multicloud maturity.
Quite the opposite.
We’re seeing siloed operations, duplicated tooling, and fragmented governance.
In this article, we’ll look at why the traditional multi-cloud strategy falls short and why orchestration is the smarter path forward. Finally, we’ll show you how platforms like DuploCloud are helping teams take back control.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional multicloud has failed to deliver operational efficiency due to fragmentation in APIs, tooling, and security models.
- Multicloud orchestration brings centralized control and policy enforcement across providers without sacrificing the power of individual cloud services.
- DuploCloud simplifies orchestration through automation, built-in compliance, and low-code infrastructure provisioning, which makes multicloud scale-ready for modern teams.
What Went Wrong With Traditional Multicloud
Despite its promise, traditional multicloud is now a cautionary tale. Far too many organizations rushed headfirst into multicloud strategies. But they didn’t have a clear plan for governance, tooling, or integration.
The result?
A patchwork of cloud environments that are way too complex to manage. They’re also usually inconsistent in security and way too expensive to scale. Where they were supposed to gain flexibility, teams are buried under the weight of managing disparate systems. The truth is that those systems were never meant to work together.
Below are the key breakdowns that have plagued multicloud efforts.
No Unified Control Plane
Every cloud provider has its own unique APIs, billing systems, IAM constructs, policy engines, and infrastructure tooling. What this means is that your DevOps team has to maintain three sets of playbooks, pipelines, and monitoring setups. It’s too much.
Managing lifecycle events becomes a nightmarish exercise in cloud-specific guesswork. This is because it involves actions like scaling, patching, and DR failover. Or all three at once.
Security Inconsistencies
Let’s talk about cloud security. Trying to enforce consistent identity, secrets management, and logging policies across different clouds is a lesson in impossibilities. It’s like trying to orchestrate a symphony with three conductors and no sheet music. Thanks to inconsistent IAM models, divergent encryption standards, and siloed audit trails, multicloud typically gives birth to compliance drift.
App Portability Is (Still) a Myth
Sure. Containers and Kubernetes help with packaging apps consistently. But “lift and shift” between clouds is an illusion. Cloud-native services like load balancers, managed databases, and message queues vary too widely among providers. Even if your app is containerized, the infrastructure around it, sadly, is not.
Vendor Abstraction Kills Velocity
One way to cope with multicloud differences is to build abstractions. But this usually means you have to target the “lowest common denominator” across providers. So you end up sacrificing innovation and performance just to maintain compatibility. What’s worse? You find your developers fighting those platform decisions that were supposed to set them free.
Enter: Multicloud Orchestration
After years of frustrated wrestling with fragmented cloud environments, we’re welcoming a new approach to the stage. It’s not to abandon multicloud, but to tame it.
That approach is multicloud orchestration.
Traditional multicloud means using multiple clouds independently.
Orchestration, in contrast, is about unifying those clouds.
Instead of treating AWS, Azure, and GCP like separate islands, orchestration introduces a central operating model. It coordinates how infrastructure, applications, and security policies are deployed and managed across cloud providers.
What It Means
Multicloud orchestration introduces a single control layer. This is a platform or system that sits above the cloud providers and automates:
- Provisioning
- Deployment
- Security
- Monitoring tasks
It’s like a conductor leading different cloud “instruments” to play in harmony. So you’re no longer just letting each perform independently and, inevitably, out of sync.
This approach abstracts cloud complexity, not cloud capability.
Teams still have access to the full feature sets of AWS, Azure, or GCP. But orchestration platforms relieve your team of a strenuous burden:
They don’t have to learn and manage each cloud’s APIs, infrastructure constructs, and compliance tooling.
Think of this difference as one between managing cloud accounts manually and having an automation engine that:
- Enforces global policies
- Provisions environments via repeatable templates
- Gives teams a consistent interface no matter the underlying provider
Why Now?
Multicloud orchestration is getting all this attention because the stakes are higher than ever.
Your engineering teams are under pressure to deliver faster, stay compliant, and keep costs under control.
Manual coordination across clouds simply doesn’t scale.
For example, a company might want to use AWS for compute-heavy workloads, GCP for advanced machine learning services, and Azure for strong enterprise integration.
But without orchestration, your team will have to increase its efforts by a factor of three. They’ve got to provision secure, compliant environments in all three clouds.
With orchestration, they get to define those requirements once and apply them everywhere.
The bottom line: orchestration lets you scale multicloud in a disciplined way. It provides the missing foundation that turns scattered deployments into an integrated platform strategy.
Key Benefits of Multicloud Orchestration
1. Operational Consistency
With orchestration, your deployment patterns are standardized. Whether you’re spinning up more than one cloud environment in AWS or Azure, the process will be the same. Platform teams can define reusable templates and guardrails. And they can eliminate one-off scripts and snowflake pipelines in this multi-cloud environment.
2. Security & Compliance as Code
Rather than enforcing security policies post-deployment, orchestration bakes compliance into every single step of provisioning. You can define policies like role-based access control, encrypted backups, and audit logging centrally. And you can automatically apply them. It doesn’t even matter what cloud service you’re using.
3. Faster App Delivery
Development teams no longer have to waste cycles adapting IaC to each cloud platform. They can count on standardized CI/CD pipelines and shared infrastructure modules. This means that time-to-product will be dramatically reduced. Then, the orchestration layer will handle the translation between environments. So your developers can focus on shipping code.
4. Improved Cost Visibility
Orchestration enables a single view into all cloud costs and usage. No more reconciling three separate billing consoles. Now, you’ll get unified reports, real-time alerts, and spend policies. These are critical elements for budget-conscious teams that need to scale across multiple cloud providers.
5. Reduced Cognitive Load
Perhaps most exciting of all, you’re no longer burdening your teams with mastering each cloud’s quirks. Now, orchestration platforms will handle the heavy lifting. Your developers can interact with a consistent API or UI. Your infrastructure engineers can define policies once, not three times.
And everyone breathes easier.
How DuploCloud Supports Multicloud Orchestration
DuploCloud is a low-code DevOps automation platform. We built it to simplify and scale multicloud orchestration for you.
Unified DevOps Automation Platform
DuploCloud integrates with AWS, Azure, and GCP right out of the box. We offer a single interface, CLI, UI, or API, so your teams can provision and manage resources. And they don’t have to worry about context switching from one cloud infrastructure to another.
Built-In Security & Compliance Frameworks
You might be targeting SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, or FedRAMP. Whatever the case, DuploCloud automates compliance from day one. Every workload is deployed with guardrails that meet your regulatory needs. And you can roll out updates to those policies globally.
Developer Self-Service
With DuploCloud, platform teams can define reusable modules and policies. And developers can spin up environments without waiting in line. This way, you’ll reduce ticket-based bottlenecks and foster real self-service for your app teams.
Low-Code Infrastructure as Code
DuploCloud provides opinionated templates that work across cloud environments. No more writing and maintaining sprawling Terraform files. We’ll help your teams configure parameters through a simplified schema that still retains extensibility.
Out-of-the-Box CI/CD & Infra Abstraction
DuploCloud connects to GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, and more to standardize delivery pipelines. Infrastructure abstraction helps you make sure that the same deployment script works in any cloud. So you’ll cut down rework and boost reliability.
Real-World Use Cases for Multicloud Orchestration
Multicloud orchestration isn’t just a theoretical fix. It’s already delivering real value for organizations navigating complex cloud environments.
From highly regulated industries to fast-scaling startups, companies are using orchestration to:
- Regain control
- Streamline operations
- Meet diverse technical and compliance requirements
Below are some of the most common scenarios where orchestration is beyond helpful. It’s essential.
Regulated Industries with Cloud Restrictions
Financial services, healthcare, and government contractors typically face data residency requirements. Or, they have to use specific cloud vendors per client or region. Orchestration allows them to stay compliant without fragmenting operations.
M&A Scenarios
Post-acquisition, companies can find themselves stuck with inherited multicloud estates. Orchestration lets you bring governance and consistency in without forcing a painful cloud migration. And you won’t have to rewrite everything from scratch.
Platform Teams Serving Diverse Business Units
Large enterprises frequently have multiple business units. And each one has its own cloud preferences. Orchestration allows a central platform team to deliver consistent security, governance, and infrastructure patterns. And they don’t have to stifle team autonomy along the way.
Startups Moving Upmarket
Startups moving from SMBs to enterprise clients quite often find themselves facing rigorous compliance and security demands. Orchestration lets them enforce robust policies across clouds. And they can maintain agility while they do it.
Final Thoughts: Orchestration Over Fragmentation
Multicloud isn’t dead. But the way we’ve been doing it should be.
No more manually stitching together AWS, Azure, and GCP like mismatched Lego bricks.
Those days are over.
The future is not about building your own fragile abstractions. Rather, it’s about embracing orchestration platforms that give you consistency, compliance, and control out of the box.
Tools like DuploCloud are helping teams escape the cloud-native grind.
We do this by offering a unified orchestration layer. So developers can deliver and operations can scale without firefighting.
Book a demo today to see for yourself.
FAQs
Is multicloud still relevant in 2025?
Yes! Just not in its fragmented form. While many companies still use multiple clouds, the strategy has shifted toward orchestrated multicloud. Here, centralized control, automation, and compliance are the foundations of success.
What’s the difference between orchestration and abstraction?
Abstraction hides cloud differences by creating a simplified layer. And it often sacrifices functionality. Orchestration, in contrast, coordinates multiple cloud services in a way that preserves their native capabilities. And it manages them consistently all the while.
Is DuploCloud a multicloud solution?
Yes! We designed DuploCloud to work seamlessly across AWS, Azure, and GCP. We offer teams a unified platform that enables multicloud orchestration, not just basic connectivity.
Do I need to rebuild my workloads for multicloud orchestration?
Not necessarily. DuploCloud supports existing infrastructure and workflows. This helps you standardize operations across clouds without rewriting everything. In many cases, our platform can orchestrate what you already have in place.
