The dust has largely settled on the major October 2025 outages at two of the world’s three big cloud providers. Those outages showed it’s a case of when another outage will occur rather than if it will occur. Given the spiderweb-like nature of cloud provider influences on business operations, attention is now firmly on resilience.

Building cloud resilience means avoiding single-provider cloud risks through implementing a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solution. Multi-cloud solutions involve using more than one of the big three public cloud providers – Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Hybrid cloud solutions add on-premises and/or private cloud elements to your IT infrastructure.

The aim is to develop a flexible architecture that facilitates the portability and interoperability of workloads across different elements of your IT infrastructure. This interoperability and portability of workloads ensure you are not reliant on a single source, whether that is a public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises infrastructure.

How is this achieved? Here’s a brief guide to implementing multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions.

Assess Business Requirements

The starting point is to assess business requirements with a focus on identifying and prioritising building resilience into mission-critical systems. This includes core business systems such as your ERP, CRM, and order processing system. Identity and access management should also be prioritised, as should backup and data replication systems, automated failover systems, and monitoring tools.

Other systems should have resilience built in, too, but in disaster events, mission-critical systems should recover first and fastest.

Identify Single Points of Failure

Assess your current infrastructure to identify single points of failure, especially in mission-critical systems. With this understanding, it will be possible to redesign your infrastructure using a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model that eliminates single points of failure.

Map Dependencies

Map your dependencies, including identifying critical services and understanding where they run. This involves going deeper into your architecture, including investigating third-party providers.

In other words, going further than looking at the redundancy capabilities of a SaaS vendor your business depends on, as that vendor might depend on just one of the big three cloud providers. Even if your hybrid or multi-cloud strategy is robust, an outage at AWS, Microsoft, or Google could bring down an application your business depends on.

Building Your Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

The exact makeup and architecture of your hybrid or multi-cloud solution will depend on your business and requirements, but the principle is to be in a position where you can continue operating even in situations where a major cloud vendor or region suffers a significant outage. Key principles include:

• Adopt zero-trust security protocols.
• Deploy horizontally across multiple sources such as multiple public clouds, on-premises infrastructure, and hosted private clouds. Multi-region deployment is also beneficial.
• Create workaround procedures so teams know what to do if important systems suffer an outage. This should include implementing offline access capabilities for critical documentation.
• Use intelligent systems to monitor your infrastructure in real-time.
• Implement predictive analytics and maintenance technologies to identify and resolve problems before they cause downtime.
• Implement load balancing solutions that can rework systems if you are impacted by an outage.
• Automate real-time backups so there is continuous replication of data and systems.
• Keep backups on infrastructure different from primary systems.
• Develop disaster recovery plans, leveraging automation as much as possible. Focus on minimising recovery timescales.
• Regularly test disaster recovery plans.
• Regularly review and optimise disaster recovery plans.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Challenges

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies increase resilience, enabling you to continue operations when major IT vendors, such as the big three cloud providers, suffer outages. However, there are challenges that include:

• Cloud sprawl
• Management complexity and lack of comprehensive oversight
• Difficulties with governance and control
• Creation of new data silos
• Security risks because of a widened attack surface
• Higher IT infrastructure costs that can spiral if not effectively controlled
• Maintaining compliance

Next Steps

Implementing hybrid and multi-cloud IT infrastructure solutions involves following best practices and taking steps to overcome common challenges. As a result, it’s essential you have support from an experienced and trusted IT consultancy. Our experience developing complex hybrid and multi-cloud solutions for enterprise customers means we can help your organisation build cloud resilience and avoid single-provider cloud risks. Contact us at Accessplc today to arrange a consultation.