AWS and Google Cloud have introduced a multi-cloud interconnect that speeds up private connectivity between their platforms. What once took days to configure can now be set up in minutes, with built-in security and monitoring included. For organisations requiring direct links between these two clouds, this is a practical and welcome improvement. At the same time, Nutanix is pushing forward with sovereign cloud strategies, helping businesses meet data residency and compliance requirements while still preserving flexibility across diverse environments.
While these advancements mark visible multi-cloud progress, they only scratch the surface of what’s truly needed. Multi-cloud success isn’t about simply connecting providers together, but about creating a unified, seamless ecosystem. Until hyperscalers tackle portability and large-scale management, multi-cloud will remain fragmented. Announcements like these, while useful, feel more like incremental steps than groundbreaking progress.
Connectivity is just the starting point
Connecting multiple providers is only the first step in a multi-cloud strategy. The real challenge lies in delivering consistent, scalable operations across increasingly complex multi‑cloud environments – where gaps in governance, limited workload portability, cost optimisation challenges and operational complexity continue to slow progress. These announcements address just one piece of a much larger puzzle, and they arrive years after enterprises began calling for real interoperability.
True multi-cloud isn’t about stitching together isolated bridges between providers. It’s about enabling a cohesive, cloud-agnostic ecosystem in which workloads can move seamlessly based on business requirements, not platform constraints.
Today’s enterprises aren’t building a single bridge; they’re building a whole system of roads – a global network spanning AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, sovereign clouds, on-prem and edge environments. In this landscape, the most significant risks emerge during day-two operations: policy drift across multiple clouds, segmentation gaps, observability blind spots and unpredictable costs that can quickly derail budgets. A bilateral interconnect, no matter how fast or secure, does little to address these systemic, operational challenges.
Why a standardised foundation matters
Hyperscaler solutions often treat multi-cloud as a set of point-to-point connections. That approach doesn’t scale. Every new region, provider or service adds complexity. Without a standardised global foundation, teams end up managing a patchwork of environments with inconsistent policies and uneven security.
A multi-cloud fabric addresses this challenge by providing a global control layer that enforces connectivity, governance and observability across all environments. Policies are defined once
and apply universally, ensuring compliance and performance remain consistent across all clouds. This is the difference between operational chaos and operational consistency.
Without this unified layer, organisations face operational fragmentation: inconsistent policies across clouds, uneven security postures and complex troubleshooting across regions. A globally enabled fabric simplifies operations, reduces risk and creates a repeatable model for scaling multi-cloud deployments.
The hidden barrier: Multi-cloud economics
Speed is important but cost often decides whether a multi-cloud strategy ultimately succeeds. Moving data between clouds is expensive, and egress fees combined with data gravity can quickly turn even well-architected designs into financial dead ends.
For multi-cloud to be viable, predictable cost structures are essential. Without them, common patterns such as cross-cloud disaster recovery or active-active resilience may be technically feasible but financially impractical. Leaders must plan for these costs early, not after architectures are already in place. By embedding cost analytics and data-placement strategies from the outset, enterprises can avoid financial traps and ensure long-term sustainability.
Beyond connectivity: Operational consistency is the real differentiator
Hyperscalers productising bilateral interconnects is meaningful progress, but the real leap lies in moving beyond pairwise connectivity features to repeatable multi-cloud operations. Connecting two platforms is impressive, but long-term differentiation will come from the ability to run workloads consistently across all clouds.
True multi-cloud maturity means embedding governance, observability and cost predictability into the operating model from day one. Organisations need frameworks that enable them to deploy, monitor and optimise workloads across providers without introducing inconsistency or financial risk. These capabilities are what transform multi-cloud from an experiment into a practical, enterprise-ready strategy.
The future: From bridges to global digital fabric
The future of multi-cloud is a unified, globally connected fabric, not a patchwork of one-off bridges. It will be cloud-agnostic, operationally consistent and cost aware.
Today’s collaborations between hyperscalers and platforms like Nutanix are an important step, but they’re only the beginning. The next phase of innovation will focus on integrating consistent governance, security and cost management across every environment.
Connectivity is no longer the bottleneck. The real test is operating multiple clouds together securely, efficiently and sustainably, while still delivering the agility and resilience enterprises expect.
