A new AWS-Google Cloud interconnect may cut provisioning from days to minutes, but Dmitry Panenkov, CEO and Founder of emma, argues true multi-cloud success depends on governance, portability, and predictable economics.

AWS and Google Cloud’s jointly engineering multi-cloud interconnect accelerates private connectivity between the two platforms, cutting setup time from days to minutes while adding built-in security and monitoring. For organisations that require direct links between these environments, this is a practical improvement.

However, multi-cloud strategies extend far beyond connecting two providers. Governance, workload portability, cost optimisation and operational complexity remain major challenges. This announcement addresses just one facet of the multi-cloud problem, and it comes years after enterprises began calling for true interoperability.

While this marks progress, it’s incremental and long overdue. True multi-cloud isn’t just about connecting AWS and Google, but about creating a seamless ecosystem. Until hyperscalers address portability and large-scale management, multi-cloud will remain fragmented, and announcements like this will feel more like minor steps rather than transformative breakthroughs.

Progress – but only one piece of the puzzle

For technical leaders, the real challenge isn’t just creating a link between two clouds – it’s operating multi-cloud at scale. A bilateral interconnect, no matter how fast or secure, does not solve the hardest problems, such as operating a consistent network and governance model across multiple providers, accounts, regions and organisations, while avoiding the economic traps of data gravity and unpredictable egress costs.

Enterprises aren’t building a single bridge. They’re building an entire system of roads – a global network spanning AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, on-prem and edge environments. In this landscape, the real sources of risk lie in day-2 operations, policy drift, segmentation challenges, observability gaps, and cost unpredictability.

Why multi-cloud needs a standardised foundation

Hyperscaler solutions often treat multi-cloud as a series of point-to-point connections. But stitching together individual links per-region and per provider is not sustainable. True multi-cloud connectivity demands a standardised, global foundation that delivers consistent connectivity, governance and observability across all environments.

This need for standardisation grows as digital infrastructure becomes more distributed. Every new cloud, region or service adds complexity. Without a unified approach, teams are left managing a patchwork of environments. A multi-cloud fabric provides the connective layer, defining policies once and applying them everywhere, ensuring performance, compliance and visibility follow the same global model.

Without this unified layer, organisations face operational fragmentation: inconsistent policies across clouds, uneven security postures and complex troubleshooting across regions. A globally enabled fabric simplifies operations, reduces risk and creates a repeatable model for scaling multi-cloud deployments.

The economics of multi-cloud: The hidden barrier

Speed matters, but economics often determine whether multi-cloud strategies succeed or fail. Moving data between clouds is expensive. Standard egress tariffs and data gravity can turn well-architected designs into financial dead ends.

For multi-cloud to succeed, predictable cost structures are essential. Without them, common patterns such as cross-cloud disaster recovery, active-active resilience, analytics and data movement or regulated locality remain technically viable but financially impractical. Leaders must factor in these realities early, not as an afterthought.

By embedding cost analytics and data-placement strategies from the outset, enterprises can strike the right balance between agility and affordability. This proactive approach helps organisations avoid financial traps and ensures architectural choices align with long-term sustainability and ROI goals.

Moving from connection to operation

Hyperscalers productising bilateral interconnects is a step forward, but the real leap is moving from pairwise connectivity features to repeatable multi-cloud operations. Connecting two platforms is impressive, but long-term differentiation will come from the ability to manage operations consistently across all clouds.

True multi-cloud maturity requires embedding governance, observability and cost predictability into the operating model from the start. Enterprises need frameworks that let them deploy, monitor and optimise workloads across providers without introducing inconsistency or financial risk.

These advances turn multi-cloud from an experiment into a viable platform strategy. For the first time, organisations can place workloads across clouds based on performance, compliance and business objectives while maintaining a cohesive architecture and policy model.

The road ahead

The future of multi-cloud will increasingly resemble a unified, globally connected digital fabric rather than a collection of one-off bridges. It will be cloud-agnostic, operationally consistent and financially predictable.

The collaborations emerging between hyperscalers today signal progress toward this vision, but they are only the foundation. The next phase of innovation will focus on integrating consistent governance, unified security and cost management across every environment.

Establishing fast connections is no longer the challenge. The real test is running multiple clouds together securely, efficiently and sustainably, and doing so in a way that delivers the agility and resilience modern enterprises require.