Organisations adopt multicloud strategies as shift from private cloud settles

There has been relatively little shift in the distribution of public and private cloud instances within business, according to a survey of 253 IT decision-makers by Pierre Audoin Consultants for Fujitsu.

Driven by the need for faster digital transformation, hybrid IT estates have become the norm, with the most successful customers opting for a “right workload for the right cloud platform” approach, the study found.

The proportion of organisations that have cloud computing as their first choice for deployments has risen by 26 percentage points from the previous survey in 2017 to 65%, The state of orchestration 2018/19 survey reported. The study also found that the number of IT decision-makers who have a cloud-only strategy has nearly doubled from 13% in 2017 to 21% now.

“We have seen a big uptake in public cloud over the last 12 months,” said the report. “But we’ve also seen a growing focus on private cloud, especially from large enterprises. We expect to see growth in VMware cloud on AWS [Amazon Web Services] over the next 12 months. More enterprises will look to exploit this technology, to help their cloud architectures work in harmony. Having AWS services available on a VMware private cloud only makes this platform partnership even more powerful.”

Pierre Audoin Consultants found that 73% of the IT decision-makers surveyed said they had increased the number of different clouds they used since they were last surveyed in 2017. Organisations typically run services from nine cloud providers, the survey showed.

On average, the typical multicloud environment run by the organisations surveyed uses 58% private cloud resources and 42% public cloud. The consultant firm said that in two years’ time, it expected to see a modest uplift in public cloud (44%), leaving private cloud with a 56% share.

The survey found that almost two-thirds (64%) of organisations think multicloud will play a bigger part in their cloud architecture over the next two years, while 23% believe it will stay at the same level. Only 12% see multicloud becoming less significant.

Mark Phillips, head of digital pursuits at Fujitsu, said: “Now that cloud has become mainstream, it is no longer a land grab and organisations have become a lot more selective when it comes to deploying cloud services.”