UK leads the way in multi-cloud deployments

A Vanson Bourne survey of 2,300 IT decision makers for Nutanix has reported that UK organisations have adopted significantly more multiple public cloud services that other regions.

IT teams decide where to run a given business application based on factors that include the economics, regulatory compliance, performance, availability and security of the available infrastructure options. The enterprises surveyed for the study indicated that their use of both private and public clouds would rise sharply during the next 12 to 24 months.

The study found that enterprises in all parts of the world indicated plans to shift significant workloads from traditional datacentres to cloud environments in the next one to two years.

But the figures for the UK showed that 19% of UK organisations are currently using multiple cloud providers, compared to a global average of 12%. Growth in the number of companies planning to use more than one public cloud was modest, increasing from 12% currently to just 18% in two years.

More than half (52%) of UK  respondents said public cloud services “completely” meet their expectations, a significantly higher number than the worldwide average of 42% and the Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea) average of 41%. Just under half (48%) of UK respondents said public cloud services have partially met their needs.

Significantly, organisations using the public cloud spend a quarter of their annual IT budget on public cloud services. The study forecast that this figure is set to rise to 34% of the annual IT budget over the next two years. According to the study, only 6% of organisations that used public cloud services stayed under budget, while 35% overspent.

Using a hybrid cloud based IT architecture can help organisations support a multi-cloud strategy, while giving them the flexibility to run workloads on-premise or in a private cloud. 

IT decision makers ranked the ability to match applications to the right cloud environment as a critical capability for opting for a hybrid cloud architecture. The study reported that 23% regarded interoperability between cloud types as important, while 16% rated the ability to move applications back and forth between clouds higher than cost (6%) and security (5%).