Hybrid Cloud
Azure + AWS, without the tax
Multi-cloud is usually an accident — an acquisition, a team preference, a vendor promise. Running it well is a deliberate act. Here's what breaks, and what to do about it.
The reality
Six challenges nobody warned you about
Every hybrid Azure/AWS environment we've audited hits the same set of problems. The surprise isn't that they exist — it's how expensive they get before anyone names them.
Identity & access fragmentation
Entra ID and IAM don't share a model. Without a federated identity plane, engineers re-invent trust boundaries per workload — and auditors find the gaps.
Network topology sprawl
VPCs, VNets, peering, Transit Gateways, and Virtual WAN accumulate. Latency and egress costs rise silently; troubleshooting a single request spans two clouds.
Cost attribution & FinOps
Tagging conventions differ. Shared services get charged to the wrong team. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans optimize one cloud while the other leaks.
Data gravity & egress
Data lives where it was first written. Every cross-cloud analytics or ML workload becomes an egress bill and a latency problem at the same time.
Observability islands
Azure Monitor and CloudWatch, each with partial coverage. Incident response stitches dashboards by hand — until a SEV-1 makes it expensive.
Compliance & residency
Controls written for one cloud don't translate automatically. Evidence collection for SOC 2 or HIPAA takes twice as long when runbooks fork per provider.
Our playbook
A four-step path to hybrid that works
These are sequenced, not parallel. Skipping step one makes steps two through four cost twice as much to get right.
Unify identity first
Federate Entra ID with AWS IAM Identity Center (or vice versa). Every workload authenticates once; every access event lands in one audit log. Everything else gets easier after this.
One network, two clouds
A hub-and-spoke plane across Azure Virtual WAN and AWS Transit Gateway, with deterministic routing and centralized egress. Latency and cost become measurable, not mysterious.
Platform over projects
A shared platform team owns landing zones, guardrails, and golden paths on both clouds. Our medallion lakehouse accelerator gives that team a Terraform blueprint that ships the same way on AWS and Azure. Product teams pick a cloud per workload — not per preference.
FinOps as a product
A single cost model across both providers, with unit economics per service. Savings Plans, Reservations, and commitments are managed at the portfolio level, not per team.
When hybrid is the wrong answer
Not every workload should be hybrid. If your cross-cloud calls exceed a few percent of traffic, you're probably paying the tax without the benefit. We'll tell you which workloads to consolidate and which to leave where they are — in writing, with numbers. If you're consolidating, our cloud application team handles the lift; if you're replatforming, legacy modernization is the right entry point.
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