Denodo reported that organizations are accelerating their migration to the cloud to take advantage of its flexibility, control costs, accelerate time to market and simplify data management. According to respondents, who included 150 global business and IT professionals from various industry sectors, hybrid cloud deployment continues to be the dominant option, with more than a third of these organizations (35%) using this model.
The private cloud has shown significant usage, accounting for nearly a quarter of all workloads (24%), followed by the public cloud, which was almost unchanged at 16%. Multi-cloud remains a popular choice for one in ten organizations (9%) who choose to acquire the best applications, data repositories, and infrastructure synchronization technologies between different cloud service providers to avoid blocking a single supplier.
Although the number of organizations with some level of cloud adoption held steady year-over-year, the percentage of organizations that are moving advanced workloads to the cloud has increased by 25 percent (19.59 percent in 2021 vs. to 15.48 percent in 2020). While security and skills remain major concerns for organizations, the statistics clearly indicate that companies are increasingly confident moving their important workloads to the cloud and adopting the cloud more than ever. In terms of cloud providers, AWS and Azure still have the largest share of the cloud market (65% combined), while others such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are steadily taking over.
With a sizable percentage of organizations cautiously taking their first step to the cloud, the markets are becoming very popular, with nearly half (45%) taking advantage of it for various incentives, including low initial investments and risks. Utilities pricing / pay-as-you-go is the most popular motivation at 35%, followed by its ability / self-service ability to minimize dependency on IT (25%) and simplified purchasing (14%). Avoiding a long-term commitment was also a 6% motivator.
Businesses are using the cloud for multiple uses, with the top two being infrastructure usage and analytics, and AI / ML. The flow processing and AI / ML use cases are showing importance in how companies are using those technologies for their day-to-day operations, as year-over-year growth for each ranged from 50 to 100%. About 50% of the participants take advantage of multiple solutions for cloud data integration, the most popular being data lakes, ETL pipeline, cloud data storage, and object storage.
As organizations adopt the cloud faster than ever, IT processes become more automated and agile through the adoption of microservices and containers. 50% of respondents indicated that they are using Docker for automation and portability. Kubernetes adoption is also increasing steadily, because for many organizations, hundreds and sometimes thousands of microservices span both on-premises and multi-cloud IT environments.
“While we already know that the cloud has become an unavoidable force in IT infrastructure management, with many cloud migration challenges plentiful, organizations often do not have a clear path to cloud adoption. For the past four years, our clients have been sharing how they see the path to successful infrastructure modernization unfolding. We, like them, believe that a well-designed logical data fabric, built with data virtualization, can be the key to helping organizations adopt a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy that is easy to implement, manage and maintain. ” said Ravi Shankar, Denodo’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer.