LIT Weekly: Now Every Monday
Dear Future Technology Leaders,
Today we're relaunching our newsletter as LIT Weekly - delivering our Leader-Innovator-Technologist framework analysis every Monday morning. Same valuable insights with a focused new format to kickstart your week with strategic clarity and practical guidance.
This week's topic explores a critical infrastructure decision facing every CTO.
Multi-Cloud vs. All-in with One Cloud Provider: A CTO's Perspective
The LIT Framework Analysis
As a Leader
CTOs must approach the multi-cloud versus single-cloud decision as a strategic business choice rather than purely a technical one. This decision influences organisational agility, risk profile, and cross-functional collaboration.
When evaluating your cloud strategy, consider how it aligns with your organisation's broader business objectives. Does your company prioritise risk mitigation and flexibility over operational simplicity? Or does leveraging deep integration with a single provider better serve your innovation roadmap?
The multi-cloud approach can provide valuable negotiating leverage. When vendors know you have alternatives, pricing discussions often become more favourable. However, managing multiple vendor relationships demands significant leadership bandwidth and clear governance processes.
Action items:
- Establish a cloud strategy steering committee with representation from finance, security, and business units to ensure alignment
- Develop a vendor management framework that includes benchmarking, regular reviews, and clear escalation paths
As an Innovator
Innovation thrives on capabilities, and your cloud strategy fundamentally shapes what's possible. Multi-cloud approaches offer access to best-of-breed services across providers, potentially accelerating certain innovation initiatives. For instance, you might leverage Google Cloud's AI/ML capabilities whilst using AWS for enterprise workloads.
However, innovation also demands speed and simplicity. All-in with one provider allows teams to develop deep expertise in a single ecosystem, potentially accelerating development cycles. Your innovation teams can focus on solving business problems rather than managing cloud complexity.
What's your innovation profile? Do you need specialised services from multiple providers, or would standardisation on one platform better serve your innovation goals?
Action items:
- Conduct an innovation capabilities audit that maps your product roadmap against the services available from different cloud providers
- Create a cloud services catalogue that prioritises services based on innovation impact and strategic importance
As a Technologist
From a technical perspective, multi-cloud introduces significant complexity. Each provider has unique service models, APIs, security frameworks, and operational tooling. This heterogeneity can lead to increased overhead, skill fragmentation, and integration challenges.
A single-cloud strategy enables technical depth. Your engineers can develop mastery in one ecosystem, leverage provider-specific optimisations, and benefit from native integrations. This concentration of expertise can lead to better architecture decisions and more efficient operations.
However, technical lock-in is a legitimate concern. Proprietary services can create dependency, making future migrations costly and disruptive. How would your architecture adapt if commercial terms became untenable or if service quality declined?
Action items:
- Implement infrastructure-as-code practices that abstract provider-specific details where possible
- Establish reference architectures that define when to use cloud-agnostic approaches versus provider-specific services
CTO Mindset Takeaway
The multi-cloud versus single-cloud decision exemplifies why technical leadership requires an integrated perspective. While the technologist in you might be attracted to the elegance of a single platform, the leader recognises strategic risk, and the innovator sees opportunities in specialised capabilities.
Take SEEK, the Australian job marketplace, for example. Their path to AWS standardisation came after years of running multi-cloud. Their technology leaders discovered that the theoretical benefits of multi-cloud were outweighed by the practical advantages of deep expertise and architectural consistency in one platform.
Without additional data specific to your organisation's context, the optimal approach is typically a principled rather than dogmatic one. Start with business objectives, then align your cloud strategy accordingly:
- Define clear evaluation criteria based on your specific needs (cost structure, compliance requirements, innovation priorities)
- Consider a hybrid approach—standardise on one provider for most workloads while selectively using others for differentiated capabilities
- Regardless of your choice, maintain architectural hygiene by designing for portability where it matters most
The most successful CTOs recognise that cloud strategy isn't a one-time decision but an evolving position that requires regular reassessment. How might your strategy need to evolve as your organisation and the cloud landscape continue to change?
Ready to Become CTO offers both personalised CTO Coaching and The FTL Show - our Future Technology Leaders Show providing bite-sized weekly content to help you step up to an impactful technology leadership career. Visit www.becomecto.com to learn more.
