Managing hybrid and multi-cloud complexity without losing control

Most enterprises have moved past the question of whether to adopt cloud. The question now is whether they can manage what they have built.

According to Flexera's 2025 State of the Cloud Report, 70% of organizations are running hybrid cloud strategies with workloads spread across at least one public and one private cloud, and on average enterprises are using 2.4 public cloud providers simultaneously. That same report found that 84% of cloud decision-makers cite managing cloud spend as their top challenge, and organizations are exceeding cloud budgets by 17% on average, with 27% of total cloud spend going to waste.

The challenge is no longer adoption. It is discipline. Hybrid and multi-cloud environments introduce real complexity around cost, security, governance, and performance, and most organizations are managing that complexity reactively rather than by design.

How multi-cloud environments create compounding complexity

Multi-cloud adoption was largely driven by sound reasoning: avoid vendor lock-in, access best-of-breed capabilities, meet regional compliance requirements, and improve resilience. Those benefits are real. But they come with tradeoffs that scale with every provider added to the environment.

Each cloud platform operates with its own tools, APIs, pricing models, security controls, and management interfaces. When workloads are distributed across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and layered on top of on-premises infrastructure, the operational surface grows significantly. Without a unified management approach, that surface becomes increasingly difficult to govern, secure, and optimize over time.

The complexity compounds in three specific areas.

Cost visibility

In a single-cloud environment, cost management is already difficult. Across multiple providers, it becomes structurally harder. Each platform has its own billing model, usage metrics, and discount structures. Without a unified view, cost anomalies go undetected, idle resources accumulate, and spend forecasting becomes unreliable.

Flexera's 2025 data shows organizations are consistently exceeding cloud budgets by 17%, with 27% of cloud spend estimated as waste. That level of ongoing overspend is not a forecasting problem. It is a visibility and governance problem.

Security and compliance exposure

Every cloud environment added to the architecture expands the security perimeter. Each provider requires its own identity and access management configuration, its own security monitoring setup, and its own compliance controls. When those configurations are inconsistent across environments, gaps emerge, often without anyone noticing until an incident surfaces them.

In regulated industries, this is particularly acute. Financial services, healthcare, and utilities organizations operate under compliance frameworks that do not flex to accommodate inconsistent cloud security practices. Security and compliance must be maintained uniformly across every environment in the architecture, not just within individual platforms.

Governance and accountability gaps

In multi-cloud environments, ownership of what runs where, who can access it, and how it is configured often becomes unclear over time. Teams provision resources across platforms independently. Governance policies established for one environment are not consistently applied to others. The result is architectural sprawl, inconsistent controls, and a steady erosion of the operational discipline that cloud investment was meant to support.

What cloud discipline requires

Managing hybrid and multi-cloud complexity effectively requires treating cloud as an ongoing operating discipline, not a deployment project. Four capabilities define that discipline in practice.

Unified visibility across environments

Effective cloud management starts with a single, consolidated view of what exists across every environment: compute, storage, networking, security posture, and cost. Without that visibility, decisions about optimization, security, and governance are made in silos, and issues in one environment remain invisible to the teams responsible for managing others.

This is the foundation everything else depends on. Governance cannot be enforced where visibility does not exist. Costs cannot be optimized where utilization is unknown. Security cannot be sustained where configuration drift goes undetected.

FinOps as an operational practice

FinOps, the practice of bringing financial accountability and discipline to cloud spend, has grown rapidly as cloud costs have escalated. The Flexera 2025 report found that organizations with dedicated FinOps teams increased from 51% to 59% in a single year, reflecting how quickly cost management has moved from a nice-to-have to an operational requirement.

Effective FinOps includes:

• Consistent resource tagging and cost allocation across all cloud providers
• Regular rightsizing reviews to eliminate overprovisioned and idle resources
• Showback and chargeback models that connect cloud spend to the business units driving it
• Forecasting processes that account for AI and generative AI workloads, which are now adding entirely new cost layers on top of existing cloud budgets

Security embedded across every environment

Security in a multi-cloud environment cannot be managed as a collection of separate controls for each platform. It requires a consistent framework applied uniformly, regardless of where workloads run.

That means:

• Centralized identity and access management across providers
• Consistent security baselines and configuration standards applied through automation
• Continuous monitoring and alerting that spans every environment in the architecture
• Compliance controls that are operationalized into delivery workflows, not reviewed after the fact

For industries with OT/IT convergence, utilities and manufacturers in particular, this extends beyond cloud platforms into operational technology environments where security misconfigurations carry direct consequences for reliability and safety.

Governance that travels with the workload

In complex cloud environments, governance cannot be applied at the platform level alone. Policies around data residency, access controls, cost thresholds, and configuration standards need to follow workloads as they move across environments, scale up or down, and evolve over time.

This requires governance frameworks that are embedded into how workloads are deployed and managed, not applied as manual oversight after the fact. Infrastructure as code, policy-as-code practices, and automated compliance validation reduce the gap between intent and reality in environments that are too large and dynamic to govern manually.

Industry considerations

The specific challenges of hybrid and multi-cloud management vary across industries, but the underlying requirements for visibility, governance, and cost discipline are consistent.

In financial services, cloud environments must support strict data residency, audit readiness, and regulatory compliance across every platform. Governance and security cannot be platform-specific.

In healthcare, cloud architectures spanning clinical systems, data platforms, and digital applications must maintain HIPAA and HITRUST compliance uniformly. Interoperability requirements add additional complexity as data moves between environments.

In utilities and energy, hybrid architectures that bridge IT and OT environments require consistent security controls across both domains. Grid reliability and operational continuity mean that misconfigurations carry consequences beyond IT.

In communications, cloud environments supporting OSS/BSS platforms, network analytics, and customer-facing applications require performance management and cost optimization at scale, with particular attention to the cost implications of real-time data processing workloads.

In technology companies, cloud cost management and reliability directly affect product margins and SLAs. FinOps and platform engineering disciplines are operational requirements, not optimization projects.

Turning complexity into a manageable operating model

The organizations managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments most effectively are not the ones with the simplest architectures. They are the ones that have built the operational discipline to manage complexity consistently over time.

That means investing in unified visibility before complexity grows beyond what manual oversight can manage. It means treating FinOps as an ongoing practice rather than a quarterly cost review. It means embedding security and compliance into how environments are built and operated, not reviewing them after the fact. And it means establishing governance frameworks that can travel with workloads as environments evolve.

Cloud complexity is not going to decrease. AI workloads, edge computing, and continued multi-cloud adoption will add new layers of operational challenge to environments that are already difficult to manage. The organizations that build the discipline to handle that complexity now will be the ones that sustain performance and control as those environments continue to grow.

TSG helps organizations build and sustain the operational discipline required to manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale. Our integrated approach spans cloud governance, FinOps, security, and platform operations so cloud investments deliver sustained performance and control as environments grow in complexity.