Cloud Storage Myths Debunked, Part Four: Managing Multiple Clouds Is Too Complicated

Today's myth feels familiar, because it's exactly what major cloud providers want you to believe:

Multi-cloud? Sounds like a recipe for chaos. Best stick with one and avoid the hassle.

On the surface, it sounds reasonable. The "big three" clouds promote their all-in-one ecosystems as seamless and unified. One provider, one bill, one console. That should make life easier, right?

Not so fast. The promise of simplicity often hides a different reality: deep complexity, rigid architecture, and vendor lock-in. For many cloud-native teams, what's pitched as convenience ends up costing time, money, and agility.

This is the final post in our blog series debunking persistent myths about cloud storage. (You can read the first, second, and third articles in the series to get up-to-date.) And, if you've ever been told that multi-cloud is messy or risky, this one's for you.

Integrated ≠ simple

The idea that one provider equals less overhead is seductive. But in practice, integration can mean entanglement. Instead of reducing operational drag, it creates a tightly woven web of interdependent services and proprietary systems, which makes changes slow and expensive.

The all-in-one trap

Big cloud providers' platforms are sprawling by design. They're built to meet every need under one roof. However, the supposed benefit of simplicity falls apart once you actually start using that provider's full range of services.

When it comes to storage alone, teams must navigate:

• Multi-tier systems (hot, cool, cold) with different costs, speeds, and access methods, each requiring its own performance and cost configuration.
  
• Complex lifecycle policies and scripts to automate data movement between tiers.

• Intricate IAM setups to manage roles, policies, and permissions across services.

• Proprietary APIs and tooling that create migration headaches and limit portability.
  
• Console UIs and behaviors that change depending on region or storage class, adding to the learning curve.

• Deep interdependencies across services, where a small change in storage can ripple through compute, networking, and security layers.

What starts as a unified experience quickly becomes a maze of shifting rules and unstable configurations. And the more deeply your architecture relies on these moving parts, the more frustrating your operations become.

Frustration, not flexibility

Not only is it tedious to manage all of this, but it can be risky. Miss a lifecycle rule, and you might incur unexpected fees. Misconfigure access policies, and you could lose visibility into or even access to your own data.

These aren't edge cases. They're everyday realities in cloud-native environments where time is tight, systems are complex, and DevOps teams are stretched thin. Here's what that might look like in practice:

• A developer spins up a test environment without realizing data is landing in a high-cost tier.
• An SRE responds to a latency issue, only to discover the data lives in cold storage and restoring it generates retrieval costs and delays.
• A backup job fails silently because of a permissions misconfiguration buried deep in nested IAM roles.

And when something breaks, support isn't always fast or personal. Unless you're a top-tier customer, you're likely working through ticketing systems, documentation loops, or community forums.

These moments don't just cause frustration-they drain time, inflate costs, and hinder your team's ability to move fast with confidence.

Complexity isn't a multi-cloud problem. It's a design problem.

Let's revisit the myth: Multi-cloud is too complicated.

It's an understandable concern, but one that's often based on frustration inside a major cloud provider's ecosystem. When teams talk about complexity, they're usually describing the friction that comes from navigating sprawling services, managing brittle configurations, and troubleshooting opaque policies within one provider.

The real issue isn't how many clouds you use. It's how much complexity one provider can introduce when you try to adapt, integrate, or scale. Vendor-specific tooling, tightly coupled services, and unpredictable costs create the illusion of simplicity-until you need to do something the platform didn't anticipate.

That's not a multi-cloud problem. That's a design problem.

Making multi-cloud work for you

For many teams, multi-cloud isn't a grand strategy, but something that happens organically. AI workloads move to GPU providers. Content gets delivered through specialized CDNs. Backups shift to more cost-effective and geographically separated storage. Whether by design or necessity, most modern architectures already span multiple clouds.

So the smarter question isn't "Should we avoid it?" It's "How do we make it sustainable without adding unnecessary complexity?"

That's where Backblaze B2 comes in.

Backblaze B2 is purpose-built to make multi-cloud not only possible, but practical-for DevOps, SREs, and developers alike. It's focused, interoperable, and refreshingly straightforward:

• Always-hot storage: No tier juggling. No lifecycle scripts. Just fast, consistent access.
• S3-compatible APIs: Seamlessly integrates with the tools and platforms you already use, such as Terraform, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, boto3, and more.

• Streamlined IAM and UI: Control access and monitor usage without wading through layers of enterprise-grade configuration.

• Free egress: Move data where you need it and when you need to, without the surprise charges that make multi-cloud cost-prohibitive.

Many teams start small with offloading archives, mirroring backup buckets, or feeding GPU pipelines for AI training. As modular architectures grow, Backblaze B2 scales with them, but without the rigidity or lock-in.

In fact, a 2025 Enterprise Strategy Group study found that many operational tasks, such as storage deployments, storage management, and integration with the hardware and software that they already used took up to 92% less time.

The simple interface contrasted sharply with other Cloud Service Providers' interfaces that have confusing navigation and multiple options to sort through.

-Enterprise Strategy Group, "Analyzing the Economic Benefits of the Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Platform," May 2025.

Multi-cloud doesn't have to be messy. With the right storage layer, it becomes your cleanest, most strategic advantage.

Want to dig even deeper?

Download the full ebook New Cloud-Native Times Call for New Cloud Storage Approaches to explore how modular, interoperable strategies are changing the cloud-native game.