Enterprises continue to bet big on the multi-cloud

28.03.2019 1,657 4

Martin Deshev

The cloud services market continues to expand and evolve. And the State of the Cloud 2019 report by Flexera and RightScale shows that enterprises are starting to become braver when it comes to their cloud strategies.

The report reveals some interesting numbers. One of them is the mass adoption of the multi-cloud by enterprises. 84% of enterprises with over 1000 employees state they use more than 4 cloud platforms. 10% use a single public platform. 3% rely on a single private platform, while only another 3% say they have no plans to use any cloud.

Hybrid is the way to go

Out of those big enterprises which use a multi-cloud strategy, the hybrid cloud is by far the top choice. 58% deploy exactly this type of multi-cloud. 17% use multiple public cloud platforms and 9% rely on multiple private clouds.

The hybrid cloud adoption has jumped by 7% over the past year. It takes a bit of share from the other types of platforms. Also, the number of companies saying they have no plans for a multi-cloud strategy has fallen from 5% to 3%.

Big money in cloud

The report also shows that enterprises spend big on public cloud. 23% of all respondents say they spend at least $2.4 million per year on public cloud. About half pay at least $1.2 million or more.

The money is big and enterprises are careful of that. 84% say managing cloud spending is their biggest cloud challenge, along with governance. 69% and 73% of the SMBs share the same thoughts about both challenges respectively.

Adoption spreads

The days of AWS (Amazon Web Services) having a massive share and lead over the other public cloud services seem to be going away. The adoption of AWS actually has gone down over the past year from 64% to 61%.

Meanwhile, other major public cloud services all net healthy gains. Azure has jumped from 45% to 52%. Also, all cloud services have recorded big jumps in their workloads.

Popular services

Companies in general have started using a lot more cloud services, a lot more frequently. Among the most popular services are Data warehouse, Serverless, Batch processing, Container-as-a-Service.

Machine learning, IoT and Stream processing are also on the rise. In short, there are a lot of opportunities in the cloud market and companies are getting more and more confident to explore them.