A 2018 cloud computing study by IDG Communications, InfoWorld’s parent company, has found that organizations continue to increase their investment and evolve their cloud environments to leverage the technology to drive their business forward. With 73 percent of the 550 surveyed organizations having at least one application, or a portion of their computing infrastructure already in the cloud, it is no longer a question of if organizations will adopt cloud, but how.
The study discovered several key trends about the how of enterprise cloud adoption, including reduced concerns over cloud providers’ security, the increasing complexity of cloud deployments, and the increase in as-a-service deployment thinking.
The cloud is evolving into complex environments
Cloud environments are maturing and, in some cases, growing more complex. While 43 percent are using hybrid cloud only and 12 percent are using multicloud only, 30 percent are using both. The perceived benefits of using multicloud include:
- increased cloud options (59 percent)
- easier and faster disaster recovery (40 percent)
- increased flexibility by allowing the spread of workloads across multiple clouds (38 percent
The evolution of more complex environments has also generated the need for, or discussion around, viewing cloud providers as a portfolio, with 51 percent of respondents beginning to think this way. Organizations in technology-dependent industries are much more apt to be thinking of cloud providers within a portfolio strategy: financial services (63 percent) and high tech (63 percent) top the list, whereas manufacturing (43 percent) and education (41 percent) are least likely to be thinking of cloud providers within a portfolio strategy.
