Multicloud adoption on the rise

More than three-quarters of IT decision-makers who took part in a recent survey said they are using multiple clouds in their IT infrastructure.

HashiCorp’s inaugural State of cloud strategy survey received 3,205 responses, of whom 76% said they already work in multicloud environments. This is expected to rise, according to the responses from the survey. HashiCorp reported that within two years, 86% of respondents expect to be using multicloud environments.

Of the big three public clouds, AWS was the leading provider used by respondents (88%). However, respondents expect their use of AWS to remain the same over the next two years. Microsoft Azure ranked second in terms of use or intended use (74%), with Google Cloud third (64%).

Multicloud adoption appears to be skewed heavily toward larger enterprises. According to HasiCorp’s data, 90% of survey respondents from organisations with more than 5,000 employees said they are already operating multiple clouds. It also found that 60% of small businesses, with fewer than 100 employees, are also running multiple cloud environments. Over the next two years, this is expected to rise to 81%, according to the survey responses.

Digital transformation was cited by more than one-third (34%) of the IT decision-makers as the most significant driver for multicloud adoption, followed by avoiding single supplier lock-in (30%) and cost reductions (28%). 

HashiCorp found that among the IT decision-makers who responded to its survey, cloud budgets varied by organisation size, vertical and geographic region. The survey reported that 40% of respondents’ organisations have an annual cloud spend of $100,000 to $2m, while 27% of organisations spend less than $100,000 a year. Some 18% of organisations spend between $2m and $10m, and 15% spend more than $10m a year. 

For more than half (51%) of the respondents, cost is their top concern, inhibiting the adoption of cloud in their organisation. Almost 40% said their organisation overspent their planned budgets on cloud, most often because of shifting priorities (29%) or because of unexpected needs related to Covid-19 (21%).

Almost half of the respondents named security concerns a top-three cloud inhibitor, but security and governance were mentioned in the top three multicloud drivers by 16% of respondents. HashiCorp said staffing and skill shortages (26%) topped the list when respondents were asked about the most significant cloud security challenges. This was followed by insufficient tooling and no real-time visibility and insight (12% each).

According to HashiCorp, organisations are struggling to operationalise their multicloud IT environments. The top reasons given include skills shortages (57%), budget constraints that affect headcount (27%), inconsistent workflows across cloud environments (33%), organisations and teams working in silos and poor collaboration or processes that are too complex (29%).

Organisations with larger cloud budgets were more likely to have a cloud centre of excellence, with 66% of organisations with an annual cloud budget of $5m to $50m having one, compared with 40% of the organisations surveyed overall.