Optimizing Workloads in a Multicloud World

This post is the final installment in our multicloud series. In previous articles, we’ve defined multicloud architecture, highlighted how multicloud can help you work more efficiently, and outlined steps for a seamless transition. In this article, we’ll look at the overall journey to true multicloud and best practices and tools for moving forward once you’ve reached your destination.

You’ve made the decision to go multicloud. Now that you know the steps involved, let’s analyze how you can gain business value from the journey toward a modern multicloud architecture and the final destination.

With best practices for optimization and tools like workload automation, performance monitoring and AI-based decision-making, you can continually tune performance, manage costs and maintain flexibility. This empowers you to unlock the potential of your workloads and move from implementation to efficient and resilient operations.

The Journey to Multicloud: A Hidden Source of Value

Moving to a multicloud architecture is a long-term endeavor. Think of it as a transformational journey that comes with significant operational and strategic rewards along the way.

Tool and process consolidation

Bringing on-premises, co-location and one-to-many public cloud environments to a true multicloud environment enables you to reduce redundant management tools and processes that were previously needed to operate siloed cloud environments. This helps streamline operations, reduce complexity and efficiently resolve issues.

Open the gateway of visibility into data and applications

A unified monitoring and management solution will give you optimal visibility and control when migrating workloads and data across your multicloud platform. With a better, more granular understanding of where your organization’s data is, as well as its value, there is real potential for IT teams to also identify opportunities to reduce duplicate, redundant or obsolete data and to optimize for cost, risk and compliance concerns.

Excellent security

The migration planning process is a perfect opportunity to implement plans to strengthen and standardize security protocols and tools across your environment. Common tooling and consistent governance models, once implemented, can greatly reduce fragmented policies and increase control over the entire system.

And with a single unified security approach, it’s easy to troubleshoot issues and optimize response time to a security event.

Cost optimization

With greater visibility into data and applications, you can see where resources are duplicated, underutilized or not performing optimally due to over allocation. By consolidating and standardizing your environments, you can optimize utilization and streamline operations to address costs and reallocate budgets where they’re needed most.

Furthermore, the ability to seamlessly move workloads between cloud environments enables you to take advantage of financial incentives in one or more of your cloud environments when they arise.

Operational efficiency

While migration to multicloud has its own set of challenges, you will ultimately be moving to a modern and efficient infrastructure with access to tools that provide opportunities to help you streamline deployment, simplify monitoring and maintenance, and reduce management burdens – and move your organization toward its goals for faster and more reliable operations.

Reaching the Multicloud Destination Delivers Flexibility, Resilience and Control

Once your multicloud architecture is in place, the real advantages begin to emerge. The organizations that find the most success are the ones that see reaching this point as an opportunity for ongoing, evolving improvement.

At this stage, the key benefits include:

• Resilience and business continuity: The ease of distributing workloads to different cloud platforms as needed reduces your dependence on any single platform’s availability or issues. It also addresses the risk of downtime or disruption and may provide disaster recovery capabilities.
• Vendor choice and cost optimization: Multicloud allows you to find competitive pricing and select the cost-effective services for each workload. It also allows you to address vendor lock-in risk.
• Performance at scale: Intelligent workload placement provides opportunities to place applications closer to users and data to reduce latency, or in environments with preferred performance or hardware capabilities.
• Compliance and security adaptability: Select appropriate cloud locations or providers with specific certifications to effectively meet regional and industry compliance needs.
• True agility and future-proofing: Take advantage of innovations from any provider to tailor solutions to specific business needs and adapt quickly to changing requirements or market conditions.

To achieve and maintain these multicloud benefits over the long term, strategic optimization is critical and requires tools like automation and performance monitoring.

Automation and Performance Monitoring are Key to Optimization

Automation

In today’s data-driven business landscape, automation and performance monitoring are no longer optional. They are foundational to multicloud success.

Automation frameworks can orchestrate workloads and place them in the right clouds at the right time based on business policies, cost thresholds and performance needs. This helps you avoid common optimization challenges such as inconsistent resource allocation, scaling difficulties and unexpected downtime due to outages.

This kind of intelligent automation is possible once you’ve defined the true operational needs of each workload – not just the nice-to-haves. The more constraints, thresholds and flexibility you define upfront, the more value automation can deliver.

Monitoring

One of the biggest challenges with any IT infrastructure is monitoring. Without a multicloud architecture, organizations have to rely on a combination of cloud-native dashboards, third-party tools and custom scripts. These disparate systems often don’t measure the same things, so you may get siloed metrics and reports with lots of facts that aren’t actionable.

With multicloud managed through a single pane of glass console, the monitoring system design provides visibility into the metrics and the performance of all of your workloads and data, wherever they’re located. Unified monitoring gives you data that allows you to benchmark performance across environments, track costs, and get actionable alerts and insights driven by AI.

This consolidated view helps you understand what’s happening, why it’s occurring and what to do next. For example, if a cloud provider rolls out a better-performing machine class or significantly reduces prices temporarily, you can take advantage of those changes and shift workloads accordingly.

Future-Proofing: Getting Ready for AI-Driven Optimization and New Technologies

With the rise of AI and other advanced technologies, workload optimization is evolving quickly. Multicloud infrastructure empowers you to adapt to new tools and services with agility. It gives you the flexibility to take advantage of advancements that may save you money, increase performance and boost innovation.

Take AI inferencing as an example. While early deployments required GPUs, today’s optimized and tuned large-language models often run just as well on modern CPUs or accelerators, thanks to pruning, quantization, distillation, and mixture of experts (MoE). You risk limiting yourself when you narrowly define your workload hosting requirements to run on GPUs or a specific GPU.

Multicloud infrastructure provides organizations with the opportunity to select the most appropriate tools across a variety of cloud platforms so you can avoid limiting your options and driving up costs. It gives you the ability to describe what a workload needs to achieve rather than how to achieve it. This is just one example of how automation, AI and multicloud agility can work together to help you stay competitive.

Overcoming the Biggest Barrier: Resistance to Change

The largest obstacle to moving to multicloud and optimizing workloads isn’t technical. It’s human. People get entrenched in legacy systems and traditional ways of doing things. Protecting what’s familiar can be a natural inclination as people build their careers and expertise around particular tools and processes.

Unfortunately, organizations that hold on to old strategies as the world swiftly transforms around them can find themselves scrambling when regulatory mandates and customer expectations finally force them to change.

The key to success is a mindset of continuous improvement. Stay open and adaptable to shifting conditions, and never assume that your original plan was the best one. Technology and your business needs will change throughout the journey.

Give your organization the flexibility to make course corrections along the way to achieve the best outcomes and encourage people to cultivate diverse and multidimensional career paths. Upskilling and cross training will be key in the future career success of your employees.

Multicloud Optimization and Continual Adaptation

The journey to multicloud can be a great time of discovery and learning for your organization. Reaching the destination is simply a new beginning and an opportunity to continue improving and optimizing operations.

Organizations that embrace the journey as much as the destination will extract the most value from their investments. Through tool consolidation, unified monitoring, intelligent automation, and a forward-looking approach to workload design and placement, you can realize the full promise of multicloud: Agility, resilience, performance, and cost management. Being open to agnostic approaches to location and flexible workload deployments can create optimized business results.

But the real differentiator isn’t the architecture itself. It’s a mindset that values flexibility and sees optimization as an ongoing opportunity to get better, faster and smarter.

©2025 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).