For a long time, it was easy to think of hybrid multicloud as something that happened to enterprises. Organizations pursuing “cloud-first” strategies in the 2010s often ended up with workloads distributed across public clouds, private infrastructure, and edge environments. Too often, this sprawl emerged one project and one tactical decision at a time, without an overarching strategy to manage the compounding complexity.
That story is out of date.
Today, enterprise leaders are deliberately choosing hybrid multicloud because it enables the flexibility and control they need. It is no longer an interim state, but a strategic architecture design choice. Leaders are increasingly placing workloads where they run best based on cost, performance, resilience, and sovereignty needs. In fact, our latest State of Application Strategy Report found that 93% of organizations now operate in hybrid multicloud environments. Moreover, 86% are running applications on-premises, in public clouds, and in colocation facilities simultaneously.
To support this shift, we are seeing reinvestment in private data centers and a steady pace of workload repatriation. Our research shows that in any given year, enterprises strategically migrate between 10% to 20% of their workloads back on-premises from public cloud environments.
Why hybrid multicloud adoption keeps growing
With this momentum expected to continue, it is worth pausing to examine the forces behind it. After a decade of prioritizing migration to the cloud, why has hybrid multicloud become the permanent operating model?
- Cost and workload optimization: Enterprises are repatriating applications from the public cloud when the economics stop making sense. This is common for predictable and high-throughput workloads.
- Regulatory and resiliency requirements: Regulations such as the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) require financial services organizations to keep core data on-premises while using the cloud for disaster recovery; healthcare regulations require a similar structure for patient data. Increasingly, global enterprises treat their most demanding compliance and resilience standards as the enterprise baseline everywhere, rather than fragmenting operations across jurisdictions.
- Digital sovereignty: As geopolitical landscapes shift, organizations are deliberately relocating data and infrastructure to maintain sovereign control over where their operations reside. This is driving moves to regional providers and reinvestment in private, on-premises data centers.
- Data gravity: As enterprise data volumes explode, it is far more efficient to bring compute and AI models to the data than to move massive datasets to the compute. Performance, latency, and security requirements make this architecture essential.
At the heart of every hybrid multicloud strategy, there are two seemingly contradictory needs: flexibility and control. Resilience requires the flexibility to deploy workloads anywhere; sovereignty requires uncompromising control over data, operations, and infrastructure.
How platforms overcome complexity
Whether enterprises arrived at hybrid multicloud by accident years ago or by deliberate design today, complexity remains the defining operational tax.
Our State of Application Strategy Report found that the average enterprise today runs applications across 22 different locations. Each of those environments comes with its own operations stack, security policies, and operational silos. A security policy applied in one cloud does not automatically carry over to private infrastructure. Visibility is fragmented across dozens of disconnected consoles. Teams are forced to maintain niche expertise across disparate platforms, and every new environment introduces an additional surface area of risk.
“What enterprise leaders consistently tell us is that they need uniform security, traffic management, visibility, and governance everywhere their applications run—not separate tools for each silo, but a single, consistent operational layer.”
Thankfully, having learned from the past, organizations are choosing vendor consolidation versus point solutions to manage complexity. What enterprise leaders consistently tell us is that they need uniform security, traffic management, visibility, and governance everywhere their applications run—not separate tools for each silo, but a single, consistent operational layer.
That is the power of a platform approach.
Instead of reconciling policies across a dozen consoles, security is set once and enforced everywhere. Instead of stitching together visibility from whatever each environment happens to offer, teams get one consistent view across all of it. Delivery and security stop being separate problems solved by separate tools and become one problem, solved once.
This is the thinking behind the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform—built to give enterprises that consistency across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. This platform approach is especially critical as enterprise AI accelerates. AI is inherently hybrid—models may be trained in one environment, refined in another, and deployed for inference directly where sensitive data lives.
Hybrid multicloud is strategic and here to stay. The organizations that will create the greatest competitive advantage are those that adopt a unified platform to capture all of its flexibility without paying the price of its complexity.
To learn more, visit our F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform webpage.
About the Author
François Locoh-Donou is F5’s Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer. He joined F5 in April 2017 as President, CEO, and director. He was appointed Chairman of the Board in March 2026. Since joining F5 as CEO in April 2017, he has spearheaded the company’s business transformation from a networking hardware maker to a software- and SaaS-first leader in hybrid, multicloud application delivery and security. He has also been instrumental in the company’s cultural transformation to a high-performance, human-first organization energized by F5’s purpose to build a better digital world. Prior to joining F5, Locoh-Donou served as Chief Operating Officer at Ciena, a global networking solutions provider to the telecom industry; his leadership positions there also included executive roles in the Product, Sales, and Marketing organizations. He also held research and development roles at Photonetics, a French opto-electronics company. Raised in Togo and France, Locoh-Donou holds engineering degrees from École Centrale de Marseille and Télécom ParisTech in France, as well as an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the co-founder and chairman of Cajou Espoir, a cashew processing business employing several hundred people, mostly women, in rural Togo. Locoh-Donou also serves on the Board of Directors of Capital One, one of the most recognized brands in banking serving the U.S., U.K., and Canada.
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