Survey Results Show How the Hybrid Cloud Is Happening
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this post.
We’re seeing a growing number of enterprise use cases that involve multiple and hybrid cloud use, as well as continued survey data reinforcing the idea that enterprises are interested in leveraging not just one public cloud, but multiple public clouds and not just public clouds, but private clouds and on-premises environments as well.
According to 451 Research’s research done for Bitnami “Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Hosting and Managed Services, Budgets and Outlook” survey of 644 enterprise IT decision — makers in 2018, more than half (58%) of organizations are pursuing a hybrid strategy involving integrated on-premises systems and off-premises cloud/hosted resources.
Yet there is still some skepticism of the idea that enterprises are embracing this multi and hybrid cloud strategy — reminiscent of some of the fear, uncertainty and doubt that accompanied growing cloud use in general years ago.
Perhaps this is because some folks only see the multicloud reality of today and have a hard time buying into the idea of hybrid cloud nirvana, where applications and their APIs and data are truly portable across different cloud and on-premise environments. Enterprise organizations have typically adopted their way into the multicloud reality of today. They have adopted IaaS, SaaS and PaaS fairly separately, seeking integration when they can get it, but mostly serving different contingencies of developers, IT operators and lines of business within their organization. As these organizations look to the future, they typically want to leverage the different infrastructures when they make most sense based on factors such as cost, performance, data sovereignty and geographic location/zone. This best execution venue (BEV) approach makes sense, but only if applications can run seamlessly across the different infrastructures, both cloud and on-premises.
Our Voice of the Enterprise Digital Pulse: Vendor Evaluations 2018 report indicates that nearly all of these environments are poised for growth, mostly at the expense of traditional IT infrastructure, which is declining. When asked which was their organization’s primary workload deployment venue, our survey of more than 1,000 IT decision — makers indicated IaaS growing from 8% in 2018 to 19% in 2020. SaaS as the primary workload venue grew from 12% in 2018 to 20% in 2020. On-premises private cloud also grew from 16 percent in 2018 to 20% in 2020.
Most organizations are working toward using this combination of infrastructures and we also increasingly see a mix of different public clouds that accel in different areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, big data applications and technologies or breadth of services. We’ve not reached the hybrid cloud nirvana yet, but many organizations are getting closer. Though it was a smaller percentage of survey respondents, our “Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation, Workloads and Key Projects 2017” indicated nearly 13% of organizations planned over the next two years for multiple cloud environments where the delivery of a single business function across the different cloud environments is seamless.
Additional evidence of the enterprise embrace of multi and hybrid cloud can be seen in the ongoing growth of Kubernetes, a distributed application framework as well as a container orchestration technology. Just as Docker containers were well timed with enterprise adoption of the cloud in general, Kubernetes is well timed with growing enterprise adoption of hybrid cloud. Despite its complexity and other challenges, Kubernetes, along with the hyperscale public cloud providers, is really shaping the modern IT operations paradigm.
Further validation of the reality of hybrid cloud came in last year’s IBM — Red Hat $33.4 billion mega-deal, with IBM highlighting hybrid cloud as a main driver of the deal. When we surveyed our 451 Alliance group of several hundred enterprise leaders just after the deal was announced, they seemed to agree that hybrid cloud was a big part of it, with “multicloud improvements” cited as a driver of positive sentiment about the deal (as highlighted in another blog post. That survey also indicated hybrid cloud was “very important” (31%) and “somewhat important” (35%) to an overwhelming majority of the more than 565 respondents, only 14 percent of whom said hybrid cloud is “not very important” and only 9% of whom indicated hybrid cloud was “not at all important” to their organization’s future.
Fueling the adoption of cloud-native technologies such as containers and Kubernetes and multi and hybrid cloud is digital transformation. One of the first and most basic steps in enterprise digital transformation is effectively leveraging different cloud computing infrastructures and also enabling developers and IT operations to move faster and more efficiently using different cloud infrastructures. As we move further from today’s multicloud reality, enterprises will be increasingly closer to true hybrid cloud nirvana, whereby workloads run on the most efficient infrastructure that is a choice among many.
To learn more about containerized infrastructure and cloud native technologies, consider coming to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Barcelona, May 20-23 in Barcelona.
Feature image via Pixabay.