The cloud has inevitably emerged as a key focus for many business leaders.
Organisations are accelerating their cloud journey to take advantage of its flexibility, control costs, speed time-to-market, and simplify data management. Hybrid-cloud deployment remains the dominant choice, as more than a third of these organisations (35 per cent) use this model.
A recently released report from Denodo, private cloud has shown some vibrant usage, accounting for almost a quarter of all workloads (24 per cent), followed by public cloud, which remained almost flat at 16 per cent. Multi-cloud remains a popular choice for almost one in ten organisations (9 per cent) 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 organisations with some level of cloud adoption remained steady year-over-year, the per centage of organisations that are moving advanced workloads to the cloud has increased by 25 per cent (19.59 per cent in 2021 vs. 15.48 per cent in 2020). While security and skills are still major concerns for organisations, the statistics clearly indicates that businesses are becoming more confident about moving their important workloads to the cloud and embracing cloud more than ever.
In terms of cloud providers, AWS and Asure still hold the lion’s share of the cloud market (65 per cent combined), while others like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are slowly catching up.
As a sizeable per centage of organisations are cautiously putting their first step into the cloud, Marketplaces are becoming very popular as almost half (45 per cent) are leveraging them to take advantage of various incentives, including low upfront investments and risks. Utility/pay-as-you-go pricing is the most popular motivation at 35 per cent followed by its self-service capability/ability to minimise IT dependency (25 per cent), and simplified procurement (14 per cent). Avoiding a long-term commitment was also a motivator at 6 per cent.
Companies are using cloud for various use cases with the top two popular being analytics and infrastructure usage, and AI/ML. AI/ML and stream processing use cases are showcasing their importance on how businesses are using those technologies for their day-to-day operations, as year-over-year growth for each ranged between 50 and 100 per cent. Close to 50 per cent 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 organisations embrace cloud faster than ever, IT processes are becoming more automated and agile through the adoption of microservices and containers. Fifty per cent of survey respondents indicated that they are using Docker for automation and portability. Kubernetes adoption is also increasing at a steady pace, because for many organisations, hundreds and at times thousands of microservices span both on-premises IT environments and multiple clouds.
