Over the past few years, a very important IT trend has emerged: Companies that once thought a single public cloud could meet all their needs now realize that is not the case. Far from it.

A recent Wall Street Journal story takes a good look at the rapid rise of multi-cloud, quoting analysts, customers, and tech execs who agree that not all clouds are built the same, and businesses need to be smart about where they run important workloads. It is critical that these organizations find the cloud that best suits specific application needs and business goals.

This article and others note that choice has arrived in the world of public cloud, and businesses and governments need not only to assess which option is best for their different applications, but also plan well to avoid vendor lock-in. We would argue that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which was built to run critical business applications securely and at scale, offers the best services for complicated financial, manufacturing, and other workloads that are core to a business’s success—even viability.

In addition, the economics of cloud are a top issue, and we can point to a range of totally new-to-Oracle customers, such as rapidly growing video streaming companies that have achieved eye-popping price-performances advantages and significantly reduced costs with OCI. One such customer, 8X8, which offers enterprise-class video conferencing, chat, and voice services to businesses, saw 80% cost savings in data transmission bills using Oracle over AWS, for example.

Companies including Albertson’s, Cox Automotive, Experian, Halliburton, and TIM Brasil, a large Brazilian telecommunications provider, are putting more data and applications into a public cloud but are not going all-in on the early players these days. Every business should follow their lead and carefully assess which clouds are best for their specific purposes.

Read more about Oracle’s multi-cloud strategy here.