Fulcrum Digital on how multi-cloud complexity is reshaping partner business models

As enterprises expand workloads across AWS, Azure, GCP, and private infrastructure, the complexity of managing cloud environments is increasing rapidly. According to Vaibhav Tare, CISO, Fulcrum Digital, this operational fragmentation is fundamentally changing how service providers engage with customers and generate revenue.

Tare believes the traditional cloud services model built around migration and deployment projects is no longer sustainable in a multi-cloud world. Enterprises are now prioritising operational outcomes, governance, cost optimisation, and continuous visibility rather than simply acquiring cloud capacity.

“The one-time project is now just the entry point,” Tare said. “The recurring managed services contract is where sustainable revenue lives.”

According to him, enterprises that accelerated cloud adoption during the pandemic years are now struggling with fragmented visibility, rising cloud expenditure, governance challenges, and operational inefficiencies across distributed cloud environments.

Multi-cloud operations are pushing partners toward recurring managed services

Fulcrum Digital has increasingly shifted toward annuity-led engagements focused on governance, observability, cloud security posture management, and continuous cost optimisation. Tare explained that customers are no longer looking for isolated implementation projects. Instead, they expect managed operational outcomes that improve efficiency and reduce downtime.

“What we are witnessing on the ground is that many organisations still lack in-house expertise around multi-cloud operations, Kubernetes environments, cloud-native security, and FinOps governance,” he said.

According to Tare, enterprises are now demanding contractual accountability around operational outcomes rather than aspirational service promises. This has significantly increased the importance of managed cloud operations and long-term service engagement models.

He added that organisations increasingly expect service providers to deliver measurable improvements in operational efficiency, productivity, and cloud cost management through continuous optimisation frameworks.

Cloud security posture management and FinOps are seeing strong demand

Fulcrum Digital is currently witnessing strong enterprise demand across three major managed services areas: cloud security posture management, FinOps-led governance, and multi-cloud observability with AIOps integration.

Tare described Cloud Security Posture Management and Compliance-as-a-Service as one of the company’s fastest-growing practices. As organisations expand workloads across multiple cloud providers, maintaining consistent governance and security policies has become increasingly difficult.

“Customers are increasingly asking for a single pane of glass that covers identity, access, and posture across all three hyperscalers, and they want it operated, not just installed,” he explained.

At the same time, cloud spending pressures are driving enterprise interest in FinOps-led governance models. Tare noted that many organisations are facing “sticker shock” as cloud usage scales rapidly without corresponding governance structures. This has created demand for managed FinOps services that include tagging discipline, cost allocation, savings optimisation, anomaly detection, and continuous spending visibility.

According to him, enterprises are increasingly treating cloud financial governance as an ongoing operational requirement rather than a periodic review exercise.

DPDP Act compliance is changing enterprise cloud architecture conversations

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act is also emerging as a major catalyst reshaping enterprise cloud governance discussions. Tare described the legislation as an architectural inflexion point rather than simply a compliance requirement.

“The DPDP Act has become one of the most consequential forces reshaping our customer conversations in 2026,” he said.

According to Tare, enterprises are now being forced to answer operational questions they had previously postponed. These include identifying where personal data resides across cloud environments, managing residency obligations, enforcing deletion policies, and maintaining visibility across distributed workloads.

Fulcrum Digital has built a DPDP readiness assessment framework that maps personal data flows across multi-cloud environments and identifies residency or processing risks. Tare explained that this framework has become an important starting point for enterprise cloud governance conversations.

“Enterprises that are waiting for May 2027 to begin are making a strategic mistake,” he added, noting that organisations must begin operational planning and remediation well before enforcement timelines mature.

Policy-as-code and sovereign cloud models are creating new partner opportunities

Tare believes multi-cloud automation and governance remain structurally underexploited opportunities for the partner ecosystem in India. As enterprises distribute workloads across multiple hyperscalers and private infrastructure environments, the need for orchestration, governance visibility, and unified operational control is increasing significantly.

According to him, policy-as-code frameworks and automated guardrails will become increasingly important as organisations seek governance models that remain consistent regardless of cloud platform.

“Rather than manual governance reviews, enterprises need policy enforcement that travels with the workload regardless of which cloud it runs on,” Tare said.

He also highlighted growing demand around data governance, lineage tracking, and sovereign cloud architectures, particularly in highly regulated sectors such as BFSI, healthcare, and government-adjacent enterprises, where data sovereignty requirements are becoming critical operational priorities.

AIOps is becoming essential for scaling cloud-managed services

Fulcrum Digital increasingly sees AIOps as an operational necessity rather than an optional technology layer. Tare explained that the telemetry generated across modern multi-cloud environments has already exceeded what human operational teams can realistically process manually.

“AIOps has moved from an aspiration to an operational imperative for us,” he said.

The company has integrated dynamic baselining, anomaly detection, automated remediation runbooks, and predictive operational models into its managed cloud operations practice. According to Tare, this allows engineering teams to focus on higher-order architectural and strategic problems while automation handles tier-one and tier-two operational incidents.

He believes the broader market direction is becoming increasingly clear. Multi-cloud complexity will continue growing as enterprises expand AI-driven workloads and distributed cloud operations. The organisations that successfully operationalise AIOps, cloud governance, cybersecurity, and FinOps into integrated managed services models will likely build the strongest long-term differentiation in the market.

“The multi-cloud paradox is real,” Tare concluded. “The same complexity that challenges enterprises is the complexity that creates our most valuable service opportunities.”

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