Beyond public cloud, hybrid cloud and multicloud there is now supercloud, a relatively new cloud strategy that is growing in popularity. First coined in 2016 by Cornell University researchers, the term describes an approach that “allows applications to move seamlessly between clouds, or even operate across multiple clouds at the same time,” according to a an IDC blog post.
Supercloud is poised to alleviate common pain points for the 60% of IT teams that leverage more than one IT infrastructure, according to a Nutanix study. It also offers an answer to the 94% of IT teams that say they’d “benefit from having a single place to manage applications and data across diverse environments.”
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What Is Supercloud? How Is It Different From Multicloud?
Supercloud uses a unified architecture so teams can manage multiple cloud platforms without any added complexity. “With supercloud, cloud service vendors’ tooling and configurations would become less important because they’d be abstracted from IT operations,” the IDC post notes. This makes it possible to seamlessly integrate data across multiple clouds and on-premises environments. And for businesses handling massive data sets, this means reduced latency and real-time insights.
Supercloud isn’t a replacement for multicloud, it’s a complementary architecture. Traditional multicloud architectures diversify cloud usage across various platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform with no deep integration between them. It offers teams a choice about where they want to host set workloads, but migrating data from one platform to another can be cumbersome, particularly when it comes to identity and access management and reconfiguring networking, IDC notes.
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Supercloud Is Improving Access to Data Across Environments
Before supercloud arrived on the scene, hosting applications simultaneously across clouds required IT teams to take risks, such as implementing logic that could complicate application development. Now, businesses can have data access and governance policies in place across diverse cloud environments.
Experts say supercloud is positioned to become the ultimate data fabric because it “facilitates the end-to-end integration of various data pipelines and cloud environments through the use of intelligent and automated systems,” notes IBM.
94%
The percentage of IT teams that say they would benefit from using supercloud to manage applications and data across diverse environments
Source: nutanix.com, “Study Shows Data Management Becoming More Complex as Cloud Deployments Diversify,” March 22, 2023
Why Businesses Are Embracing Supercloud
“Creating a true supercloud is hard work and takes a lot of dedicated engineering time,” writes CDW expert Rob Sims in a company blog. But it can be well worth the investment.
Supercloud acts as a central nervous system for data flow, which can help businesses achieve “data synchronization,” one of the most urgent generative artificial intelligence (AI) challenges IT leaders need to prioritize, according to Gartner.
Supercloud also has become more relevant because “container-based, serverless and microservices-based applications are much better-placed to work within supercloud architectures,” notes Sims. In fact, 90% of organizations surveyed in the 7th Annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index report that at least some of their applications are now containerized, and 94% of respondents agree that their organizations benefit from cloud-native applications.
Supercloud is also proving useful in cybersecurity because it offers centralized control of all potential risks, simplifying audits. Fortinet’s 2025 State of Cloud Security Report found that 97% of respondents say they “prefer centralized solutions that simplify policy management, enhance visibility, and ensure consistent enforcement across diverse environments,” according to a press release
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Supercloud Supports AI Workloads
With built-in governance, security and workload portability, superclouds provide AI models with consistent access to data and computing power, reducing the complexity of managing AI pipelines across multiple cloud providers. “Not only are cloud and software vendors (Snowflake, Databricks) beginning to build their own superclouds, but companies outside of the tech space (Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, United Airlines) are creating their own as well,” according to Forbes. NVIDIA’s DGX supercloud, Walmart’s cloud-native Kubernetes-based platform and the MIT supercloud have also emerged. Supercloud will be the fastest path to managing AI workloads, and experts say that implementing observability and AIOps will accelerate adoption.
