Our Top Tips on How to Create Your Multi-Cloud Strategy for the SME Market

There has been a lot of talk about multi-cloud for years, but mid-market SMEs are already living it! According to a recent AAG IT Services survey, 89 percent of companies already run workloads across more than one cloud platform - often without a plan or the people to keep it running smoothly. From this, you can see that your priority is to turn what is often a near-accidental mix of parts into a clear, cost-controlled operation.

Why Multi-Cloud for SMEs is Different

If you’re struggling to keep up with only a mid-sized IT team, you’re not alone! In all likelihood, the problem is that you’re having to keep resources on the lowdown but, in the meantime, the outside environment keeps evolving and expanding.

A recent study by Barracuda revealed that a whopping 73% of businesses with up to 2000 employees are having to resort to outsourcing their IT security because their in-house team can’t cope. Part of the problem here, according to TechRadar, is the ever shifting cloud costs and the fact that 50% of SAP EEC clients are likely to still be running their legacy platforms in two or three years time. All of this means that it’s time to revisit the multi-cloud conversation in order to figure out which resources should be in-house and which should be outsourced.

Nowadays, many partners now lean on the TD SYNNEX CollabSolv practice, whose turnkey tech solutions bring together AV, IT, cloud and security components into pre-built blueprints.  This means that instead of building everything from scratch, components are mapped into five orchestration levels, from complex workloads to Click-to-Run deployments.  All this gives SME teams fast entry without sacrificing consistency.

What are the sticking points?  Mid-sized IT teams will find themselves bumping up against a few issues including a teeny team struggling to manage tasks, budget and cost challenges and entrenched legacy platforms. These things can lead to further sticky wickets as teams butt heads with finance teams and staged migrations and / or hybrid connectivity.

What you’re after here is clarity and transparent outcomes that can be achieved through a cloud footprint that can be up and running fast - which is much more important than stuffing your display with vendor’s logos.

Start With Workload-First Thinking

According to a recent report by Flexera, over 93% of companies have a multi-cloud strategy - in fact, the average for public cloud is 2.2. Now let’s compare that with the majority of mid-size businesses who struggle to even get close to an IAAS or PAAS option.

This means that workloads are treated as an afterthought rather than a priority. To fix this, you need to examine each and every workload and what it needs to achieve and you do this by looking at the following for every application:

1. Importance to the business - does it bring in the cash or just keep the wheels turning?
2. Techy constraints - think about integration, compliance, data stuff and latency
3. Viability of landing zones - are SaaS and PaaS options available or only raw IaaS?

Once you’ve inventoried these things, it’s time to divvy up your workloads into one of the following three sections:

• Forward thinking SaaS for your nuts and bolts stuff like email, CRM and team collaboration
• Line of business applications that are cloud-ready and can transport minimal code changes into proper managed databases and applications
• Clunky legacy systems like ERP that require their own source of connectivity or lengthy migration

After nailing this, you can opt for execution patterns rather than platforms, or a primary hyperscaler if you’re going with a new build. Niche stuff like advanced analytics or laser-targeted regions will benefit from a secondary cloud, whereas everyday functions can be handled through an approved SaaS vendor roster.

Standardize on Services

When it comes to cloud footprints, the stamp of approval only comes when baseline security, identity and advanced monitoring and backup are part of its DNA. According to The Cloud Security Alliance, nearly 60% of issues and breaches can be traced back to weaknesses like permissions or access controls which lack consistency. You therefore want to to super-standardized on:

• Identity and access management: one single-sign-on with multi-factor authentication and clear roles on all platforms
• A consolidated dashboard which monitors, log and streams system and security performance from each and every environment
• Solid RPO/RTO targets with cross cloud replication for comprehensive back up and disaster recovery - that is if you want to avoid around five hours of downtime every month
• Focused security including baseline controls, endpoint protection, typical hardening scripts and segmentation of network via policy-as-code

This type of shared layering is a win-win as it builds a template for your team while handing clients a security and operations model.

Make Governance and Cost Visibility Non-Negotiable

Cloud bills don’t creep up: they take off! Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud report shows budgets already run 17 percent over plan, and 84 percent of IT leaders list “managing cloud spend” as their biggest challenge. What’s more, self-reported waste still approaches a third of total spend, even after years of attempts at streamlining. As you can imagine, these numbers turn cost control into a core necessity, not a nice-to-have.

The trick here is to avoid veering off course by putting guardrails in place right from the start .  So how’s that done? It starts with consistent tagging and naming so that each resource lays claim to its owner, centre tag and environment, thereby smoothing out spend rolls. It’s also about keeping the finance folk happy by setting budgets with alerts in real time and finally setting proper guidelines on policies and deployment such as code or native governance tools. The latter is super important in order to streamline regions, sizes and service tiers.

Now you’re ready to bring managed FinOps into the mix through monthly optimization reviews to get rid of idle capacity and spent licenses, show and charge-back reports for a true financial picture and rightsizing to align discounts with demand.

Offer Multi-Cloud as a Managed Service

So, how big will the demand for these managed services get? The clever folk at Research and Markets reckon that, in a few years, the market will have soared from $146 billion to a staggering $242 billion – which may answer your question. It’s also worth noting that the most meteoric rise will come from SMEs.

These days, the fearless leader of a mid-market company doesn’t want to be juggling three portals and 10 helplines; they want a partner who will get it all sorted through a managed multi-cloud package. When you unwrap that package, it should contain a single entrance with just one number and manager per cloud, 24/7 monitoring and incident response and quarterly check-ins. Last but not least, it contains lifecycle stewardship where apps are switched out seamlessly with properly planned change windows.

Conclusion

What your customer is after is a streamlined, no-fuss experience where multi-cloud feels like sunshine and daisies and this is achieved by snuggling up to the right partner. From your end, this means switching out platforms and automation tools and performing regular check-ins to keep roadmaps aligned with every corner of the business including goals, budgets and events.