Multicloud environments have become the enterprise norm, but using multiple clouds has introduced a great deal of networking complexity. While companies are scurrying to take advantage of hybrid multicloud infrastructure, not least to further their strategic AI initiatives, they increasingly find themselves at odds with network architectures that weren’t designed for multicloud environments.
Without effective multicloud networking, a lot can go wrong:
- Operational inefficiencies leading to higher costs
- Service unreliability leading to poor user experiences
- Security vulnerabilities and data loss
- Regulatory risk and non-compliance
In an IT world increasingly dominated by data-driven decision-making, reliable low-latency multicloud connectivity is essential. It’s the thing that can make or break AI and edge computing success. To get it right, all your public clouds and private infrastructure must be able to communicate and exchange data efficiently and securely.
Multicloud networking needs vary widely from company to company, so evaluating and optimizing your network will be a process. But with the right approach, you can optimize costs and performance, enhance business agility and resilience, meet regulatory requirements, reduce risk and provide better user experiences.
Is your network ready to meet your business’s present and future requirements? Or is it time to do a multicloud networking self-assessment? The following list of 10 common network challenges in multicloud environments will help you determine if your multicloud network needs some attention.
10 Common Multicloud Networking Challenges
1. Traffic takes the scenic route.
Because most organizations have gradually acquired cloud resources without an overarching plan, their network architectures often came together off the cuff. Data paths can be unnecessarily long or convoluted, leading to inefficiencies and delays. The added latency and reduced performance are a big problem for many modern workloads.
The Finnish travel and logistics company VR Group had a legacy corporate network that was becoming increasingly complex and wasn’t routing traffic as efficiently as it could. The company needed fast, reliable hybrid multicloud interconnectivity, so they designed a modern, dynamic network backbone with Equinix that sped up application access and lowered costs.
Read the case study2. Cloud costs keep surprising you.
Many companies, as they’ve built up their multicloud environments, have been shocked by rising and unpredictable costs for inter-cloud traffic. In the 2025 Flexera State of the Cloud Report, 84% of respondents believe that managing cloud spend is the top cloud challenge for organizations today.[1] Some of these unexpected expenses may indicate hidden inefficiencies in your multicloud network design.
3. You’re juggling too many tools.
The more clouds you use, the more cloud-native tools your IT teams likely have to work with. Managing multiple platforms and tools can start to feel like a circus act, with no unified control. If this is your situation, you’re probably dreaming of simplified multicloud network architecture that makes it easier to unify control.
4. You have blind spots in the network.
When issues arise, some organizations have very limited visibility into their multicloud networks, making troubleshooting a guessing game. It’s hard to plan, pinpoint problems and mitigate issues without comprehensive insights into network traffic patterns.
5. Security is patchwork.
Some network teams are in a habit of applying patches when a known security issue comes up, but eventually they end up with way too many patches. Inconsistent security policies across clouds can leave gaps that could be exploited by malicious actors. To protect the business, you need to centralize security policy enforcement, governance and compliance, while intelligently decentralizing security functions to avoid bottlenecks across your network.
6. There’s too much downtime drama.
If outages are more common than you’d like to admit, your employees and customers are likely facing disruptions and poor user experiences. With better multicloud network design, you can increase uptime, improve productivity and boost user satisfaction.
7. Scaling feels like a herculean task.
Network agility has become crucial, but for many companies, expanding the network to meet new demands is more painful than it should be. Scaling network resources has become time-consuming, resource-intensive and operationally challenging.
Sometimes companies try to buy additional bandwidth or add more fixed links to their network to address their traffic volume, when in fact network architecture is the problem. If your multicloud network isn’t designed for traffic efficiency, with convergence points in key locations, trying to scale can become painful and costly.
The Hero Group, an international food company, needed to optimize their network for faster access to cloud services as well as connectivity to supply chain partners and customers. With virtual connectivity through Equinix Fabric®, they can easily scale bandwidth instantly, improving business agility and cost efficiency.
Read the case study8. Idle resources are everywhere.
Unused or underutilized network components can quietly drain your budget without delivering any value. It’s a common practice in many companies to significantly overprovision to ready their network for increases in demand. However, this is a costly way to be prepared for scaling; having a more dynamic, agile network is a better approach. Network optimization initiatives are a helpful way to deal with underutilized resources in the network architecture and reduce wasted money on overprovisioning.
9. Deployments feel as slow as dial-up.
No company wants to be held back by slow deployment cycles, waiting for new services and resources to be available. But in many multicloud environments, provisioning new connectivity or rolling out updates takes far longer than expected.
A U.S.-based healthcare system, Providence, needed faster connectivity between their core U.S. network and an innovation hub in Asia, which connected with multiple public clouds. With help from Equinix, they created a virtual networking hub and were able to reduce deployment times for their digital apps from more than 200 days to just 1 to 2 days.
Read the Case Study10. You’re locked in a single cloud’s orbit.
Organizations using multiple clouds often use built-in cloud networking capabilities. This can, however, contribute to fragmentation and overreliance on a single cloud, which doesn’t make much sense if increased independence was one of the intentions behind your multicloud model. Using cloud-neutral multicloud networking solutions positions you for better flexibility and innovation.
Never fear—Multicloud networking help is available
If you checked off several of these boxes, it’s likely that your multicloud network is overdue for a tune-up. But not to worry: Equinix is already helping companies solve all the common multicloud networking problems. For instance, our cloud-to-cloud routing solution, Equinix Fabric Cloud Router, provides an easier way to connect between your clouds on a neutral platform. And you can instantly deploy virtual network services to optimize your multicloud network with Equinix Network Edge. Our hybrid multicloud networking solutions deliver better multicloud workload performance, lower network costs, faster deployments and greater flexibility, without limiting your choice of clouds and business partners.
Learn more about how to simplify your multicloud network by downloading our multicloud networking guide.
[1] 2025 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera, 2025.
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