Denodo Reveals Results of Latest Annual Cloud-Use Survey
Hybrid-cloud deployment remains the most popular choice; multicloud management skills in high demand.
Data virtualization provider Denodo’s fourth annual cloud-use survey finds organizations are accelerating their cloud journey to take advantage of its flexibility, control costs, speed time-to-market, and simplify data management. According to survey respondents, which included 150 global business and IT professionals from various industry sectors, hybrid-cloud deployment remains the dominant choice, as more than a third of these organizations (35 percent) use this model. Private cloud has shown some vibrant usage, accounting for almost a quarter of all workloads (24 percent), followed by public cloud, which remained almost flat at 16 percent. Multi-cloud remains a popular choice for almost one in ten organizations (9 percent) who opt to procure best of breed applications, data repositories, and infrastructure orchestration technologies among different cloud service providers to avoid a single vendor lock-in.
Even though the number of organizations with some level of cloud adoption remained steady year-over-year, the percentage that are moving advanced workloads to the cloud has increased by 25 percent (20 percent in 2021 compared to 15 percent in 2020). Although security and skills remain major concerns for organizations, this growth indicates that businesses are becoming more confident about moving their important workloads to the cloud as cloud adoption continues to increase. In terms of cloud providers, AWS and Azure still hold the lion’s share of the cloud market (65 percent combined), although others including Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are slowly catching up.
As a sizeable percentage of organizations are cautiously moving to the cloud, marketplaces are becoming very popular as almost half (45 percent) are leveraging them to take advantage of various incentives, including low upfront investment and reduced risk. Utility/pay-as-you-go pricing is the most popular motivation at 35 percent, followed by its self-service capability/ability to minimize IT dependency (25 percent), and simplified procurement (14 percent). Avoiding a long-term commitment was also a motivator at 6 percent.
Companies are using cloud for various use cases with the most popular being analytics and infrastructure usage, and AI/ML. Businesses are increasingly using artificial intelligence and machine learning and stream processing for their day-to-day operations, as year-over-year growth for each ranged between 50 and 100 percent. Close to half of survey participants leverage multiple solutions for data integration in the cloud, the most popular ones being data lakes, ETL pipeline, cloud data warehouse, and object storage.
As organizations embrace cloud, IT processes are becoming more automated and agile through microservices and containers, as 50 percent of respondents indicated that they are using Docker for automation and portability. Kubernetes adoption is also increasing at a steady pace, because for many organizations, hundreds and, at times, thousands of microservices span both on-premises IT environments and multiple clouds.
The full report is available for download.