Compliance with regulations and avoiding vendor lock-in are the top reasons for choosing Mulitcloud. The motives are more often business than technical.

Cockroach Labs surveyed 300 cloud engineers from the US and Europe about how their companies view multicloud. The idea of ​​spreading your applications across multiple public cloud providers seems to be well established. Half of companies today use a multi-cloud strategy. One in four people choose a hybrid cloud, in which (one or more) public clouds are combined with (one or more) private clouds that run in their own data centers.

The study also asks why companies choose multicloud. Regulation comes first, especially in Europe. For 42 percent, this is the main argument. This is mainly due to the (large) companies in the financial sector. From January 1, 2025, they must comply with the Digital Operational Resilience Act, which actually makes multicloud mandatory.

Other arguments also come down to business needs rather than technical desires. Avoiding vendor lock-in practices from the big hyperscalers is 41 percent of the reasons why they don’t put all their eggs in one basket. Relatedly, companies feel that in a multicloud they have more resources at the negotiating table to win favorable contracts. Building resilience closes out the top four (31%).

Obstacles

At the same time, regulations can also be an obstacle to building a multi-cloud structure. Again, this applies most strongly to Europe, where stricter data sovereignty rules apply. Distributing data across multiple clouds means that all different cloud platforms must comply with the rules. According to regulations, finding experts who can work on different cloud platforms and poor integration are the biggest difficulties in a multicloud.