Multi-cloud vendor risk management

A cloud provider goes dark. Your systems stall. Tickets spike. No one knows when the lights come back on.

Multi-cloud vendor risk management is how you make sure that never kills you. It is the practice of spotting threats across every provider you use—AWS, Azure, GCP, niche SaaS—and building controls to survive any outage, breach, or contract failure.

The challenge is scale. Each vendor has different uptime SLAs, security postures, compliance levels, and patch habits. Risks shift as they update APIs, change terms, or retire services. One overlooked dependency can cascade through your stack.

Start with a clean inventory. Map every service to the workloads it powers. Track vendor locations, certifications, and historical incident data. Identify single points of failure where one provider holds an entire function hostage.

Next, rate each vendor’s risk. Factor in uptime history, financial stability, breach reports, regulatory alignment, and support response times. Use a scoring model so you can compare across clouds and justify decisions.

Set controls. Distribute load between at least two providers for high-availability workloads. Keep hot or warm failover systems tested. Encrypt data in transit and at rest outside vendor tooling in case you need to move it fast. Build contracts with exit clauses and access guarantees.

Automate monitoring. Pull uptime, latency, and API availability into your observability stack. Alert on deviations. Run game-day drills to simulate provider loss. Review vendor risk quarterly or after any major service change.

Multi-cloud vendor risk management is not a one-time project. It is a continuous discipline that protects your uptime, data, and customers against the weakest link in your vendor chain.

See how hoop.dev can help you assess, monitor, and respond to multi-cloud vendor risks—all live in minutes.