Your Multi-Cloud Strategy Is A Lie. It’s Actually A Frankenstack

“Organisations didn’t set out to build a monster. They started off building their cloud environment for resilience, and then they added a public cloud platform for one team, another one for the data lake, threw in a private cloud for compliance, bolted on five SaaS platforms, and kept a variety of old systems just in case,” says Richard Vester, Chief Executive: Cloud at iOCO.

“The end result is that most companies now own a Frankenstack, a patchwork of half-integrated technologies stitched together with fragile APIs, custom scripts, and desperate hope. It lurches along, costs a fortune, and is essentially cloud chaos wearing a suit.”

Back to basics

Vester says that the Frankenstack is so deeply embedded into the operations of most companies that CIOs don’t know where to start fixing it. “Security teams lose sleep over shadow IT. Finance can’t explain why the cloud bill keeps growing even though headcount is flat. Innovation is a pipe dream. The brutal truth is that these types of environments have much higher operational costs than optimised cloud environments and they are fragile. Every change requires co-ordination across multiple vendors, every new workload raises integration questions, and every cost discussion turns into a blame discussion. Instead of enabling the business, the Frankenstack slows it down,” he explains.

This, he says, is the inevitable result of years of chasing speed instead of strategy, and that the only way forward for most organisations is to go back to fundamentals. Not by abandoning cloud, but by finally treating it like architecture instead of a shopping list.

“For years, the industry rewarded expansion: adding another platform or deploying another tool, and rarely stopping to ask whether the environment still made sense as a whole. Going back to basics isn’t regression, it’s maturity. It means asking where data, applications and systems should actually live, what they really cost over time, what needs to stay private, what belongs in the public cloud, and what should never have been migrated to cloud in the first place.”

By going back to basics, organisations can review their existing cloud environments, improve what is already in place, and make better decisions without having to start over. They can regain visibility, predictability, and alignment with actual business needs, turning cloud into a proactive enabler of growth, agility, and competitive edge from the reactive cost centre it currently is in most organisations.

Slaying the monster

According to Vester, this is where the role of the cloud partner is changing. “Too often, partners are brought in to migrate workloads, but the real value of a strong cloud partner is staying involved every step of the way, helping organisations make better decisions about the environments they already have. That means aligning cloud architecture to business strategy, not vendor roadmaps. It means balancing private, hybrid, and public cloud environments so that cost, compliance, performance, and scalability all make sense together. And it means continuously optimising, not just once during a project, but every month, every quarter, and every year.”

Unlike vendor-aligned providers incentivised to push more hyperscale consumption or proprietary tools, the right partner acts as an unbiased advisor focused solely on the organisation’s outcomes, Vester says. “Without independent architectural guidance, environments drift. Costs creep up, security models become inconsistent, integrations multiply, and nobody wants to touch anything because it might break something else. A good cloud partner brings discipline back into the picture. They rationalise the stack, put proper FinOps and governance in place, and make sure the technology actually supports the business instead of the other way around.”

He points out that a good partner starts the uncomfortable conversations that are necessary to put the Frankenstack out of its misery. “They ask the hard questions no internal team wants to ask, forcing the organisation to confront duplication, over-provisioning, and architectural debt head-on, because pretending it’s fine is what keeps the monster alive.”

Once those conversations begin, he says, the partner doesn’t just diagnose, they deliver a clear, phased roadmap. The result isn’t incremental savings, it’s a fundamental reset that turns a chaotic cost centre into a lean, predictable, business-aligned engine.