The average enterprise now uses between two and three public cloud providers. Each provider offers its own monitoring and security tooling -- and each tool is deliberately scoped to its own platform. The result is a set of partial views that no amount of dashboard switching can turn into a complete picture.
How Multi-Cloud Multiplies Complexity
Adding a second cloud provider does not double your operational complexity. It introduces an entirely new category of challenges:
- Inconsistent terminology -- What AWS calls a "security group," Azure calls a "network security group," and GCP calls a "firewall rule." Same concept, different names, different APIs, different behavior.
- Siloed monitoring -- AWS CloudWatch has no visibility into Azure resources. Azure Monitor cannot see GCP. Each platform's native tooling ends at its own boundary.
- Cross-cloud blind spots -- Data flowing between providers, shared credentials, and cross-cloud dependencies fall into gaps that no single provider's tooling covers.
- Context switching overhead -- Security teams moving between three consoles, three query languages, and three alert formats lose significant time to translation rather than analysis.
These are not theoretical problems. They are the daily reality for any organization running workloads across multiple clouds.
The Real Cost of Fragmented Visibility
Fragmented visibility has measurable consequences across security, operations, and finance.
Security impact. Multi-cloud breaches cost significantly more than single-cloud incidents because attackers exploit the gaps between monitoring silos. They move laterally across cloud boundaries while security teams are still correlating data from separate dashboards. Mean time to detection in multi-cloud environments averages 287 days -- nearly ten months of undetected exposure.
Operational impact. Security teams report spending up to 40% of their time on context switching between cloud platforms. This is time spent translating concepts and navigating interfaces rather than analyzing threats and reducing risk.
Financial impact. Organizations with fragmented cloud visibility waste an estimated 35% of cloud spend on forgotten or orphaned resources. That development server from last year's project is likely still running, still incurring charges, and still exposing an unpatched attack surface.
What Does Not Work
Organizations typically try several approaches before recognizing the need for unified visibility:
- Adding more tools -- Each new tool adds another dashboard, another alert stream, and another integration to maintain. Complexity compounds rather than resolves.
- Manual tracking with spreadsheets -- Cannot keep pace with the rate of change in modern cloud environments. Outdated within days of creation.
- Periodic security audits -- A quarterly audit captures a point-in-time snapshot. In environments where resources change hourly, that snapshot is stale before the audit report is written.
- Building internal integration layers -- Custom scripts and internal tooling to bridge cloud providers require ongoing maintenance and rarely achieve comprehensive coverage.
What Unified Visibility Looks Like
Effective multi-cloud visibility requires three capabilities working together:
Continuous discovery across all providers. Not daily scans or weekly syncs -- continuous awareness of every resource across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes. When a new resource appears in any environment, it should be inventoried and assessed within minutes.
Normalized resource data. A single, consistent representation of resources regardless of which cloud they run in. Security teams should not need to translate between cloud-specific terminology to understand their infrastructure.
Cross-cloud relationship mapping. Understanding how resources in different clouds connect and depend on each other. An AWS Lambda function that writes to a GCS bucket that triggers an Azure Function represents a single workflow spanning three providers -- and a single attack path that siloed tools will never surface.
Moving Forward
The multi-cloud trend is not reversing. Organizations will continue to adopt multiple providers for resilience, cost optimization, and access to specialized services. The question is not whether to run multi-cloud, but how to maintain security visibility across an inherently fragmented landscape.
The answer is not more cloud-specific tools. It is a unified visibility layer that works across all of them.
VikingCloud provides continuous discovery and unified visibility across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes -- giving security teams a single, accurate view of their entire cloud infrastructure.
Get started with VikingCloud and close the visibility gaps in your multi-cloud environment.