Why You Need a Unified Approach to Hybrid and Multicloud Management

The enterprise technology landscape has evolved into a complex ecosystem where organizations are blending multiple environments to optimize performance, cost and flexibility. Flexera’s 2025 State of Cloud report indicates 87% of organizations are operating with a multicloud strategy, while 72% embrace hybrid approaches combining public and private clouds. 

With artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives quickly gaining steam, their success largely depends on having the right infrastructure in place. Hybrid and multicloud environments provide the scalability and data accessibility that AI models require to thrive.

While hybrid and multicloud architectures have well-known advantages for operational efficiency and competitive advantage, including AI-driven innovation, they also create unprecedented complexity and operational challenges that traditional IT management approaches simply weren’t designed to handle. As businesses evolve their IT strategies to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technology landscape, a unified approach to managing hybrid and multicloud environments becomes essential to avoiding inefficiencies, security gaps and missed opportunities for improvement.

To better understand these challenges and how to overcome them, let’s first reiterate the primary value of these architectures.

Multicloud environments provide the flexibility to leverage each provider’s unique strengths while maintaining negotiating power and reducing dependency on any single vendor. For example, organizations might select AWS for compute-intensive workloads, Azure for enterprise integration and Google Cloud for data analytics — all within a cohesive strategy. Access to diverse cloud services enables organizations to experiment with cutting-edge technologies like AI and machine learning without massive upfront investments. Teams can rapidly prototype and scale successful initiatives across their preferred platforms

Similarly, hybrid approaches give organizations the flexibility to run heavier workloads in the cloud while maintaining absolute control of the data and workloads they choose to run on-premises or in private cloud environments. For example, a customer-facing web application might perform best in a public cloud environment, while sensitive financial data remains in a private cloud for compliance reasons.

Resilience is also a key value. In a recent survey, CDW found that 57% of organizations cite greater reliability and recovery capabilities across cloud environments. Yet another recent report notes 31% of businesses experience outages that can impair their ability to operate. Because hybrid and multicloud approaches enable organizations to distribute workloads across multiple environments, redundancy is naturally created. This effectively means organizations can continue operating via other platforms in their environment should one platform provider experience an outage.

While the benefits are clear, the operational reality is more demanding than many organizations initially anticipate. Managing hybrid and multicloud environments introduces unique challenges that can dampen their benefits if unchecked.

Here are some of the key challenges organizations face:

1. Tool Sprawl and Fragmented Visibility
Each cloud provider offers its own management console, monitoring tools and operational procedures. IT teams find themselves juggling multiple dashboards, struggling to maintain consistent visibility across their entire infrastructure. This fragmentation makes it difficult to identify performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities or  opportunities.

2. Siloed Operations
Research indicates that 73% of organizations report their on-premises and cloud teams work in silos. This organizational fragmentation leads to inconsistent processes, duplicated efforts and communication gaps that can impact both security and efficiency.

3. Skills and Resource Gaps
Managing multiple cloud platforms requires diverse expertise that many organizations lack internally. Teams must understand not just the technical aspects of each platform but also how to integrate them effectively while maintaining security and compliance standards.

4. Cost Management Complexity
With workloads distributed across multiple environments, tracking and optimizing costs becomes exponentially more complex. Organizations struggle to consolidate billing, allocate costs accurately and identify optimization opportunities across their hybrid infrastructure.

Leading organizations are moving to comprehensive managed services that provide a single interface and cohesive experience for their hybrid and multicloud environments. Managed services providers like CDW take a unified approach, integrating environments across cloud and/or on-premises seamlessly. These services can be all-up or a la carte, including:

• Software-defined networking (SD-WAN): Modern networking solutions create seamless connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments, optimizing traffic routing and ensuring consistent performance regardless of workload location.
• Integrated security management: Unified security platforms extend consistent protection policies across all environments, eliminating the gaps that often emerge when managing security tools independently for each platform.
• AI-powered operations: Advanced management platforms leverage artificial intelligence to monitor applications, predict potential issues and optimize resource allocation automatically across hybrid environments.
• Centralized disaster recovery: Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions provide consistent backup and recovery capabilities across all platforms, ensuring business continuity regardless of where workloads are deployed.
• Container orchestration: Kubernetes management services enable organizations to deploy and manage containerized applications consistently across any environment, providing true workload portability.

Managing multiple cloud platforms and hybrid environments doesn’t have to mean managing multiple help desks, juggling various vendor relationships or struggling with fragmented visibility into your infrastructure.

CDW specializes in multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions that simplify these complexities through a unified management approach. Our comprehensive managed services eliminate the operational overhead of managing disparate environments independently, providing you with consistent visibility, streamlined operations and optimized performance across your entire infrastructure.