Cloud technology survey reveals a hybrid cloud future

LogicMonitor, a hybrid cloud SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for Enterprise IT, has polled 135 cloud professionals at AWS re:Invent to explore how companies are managing their workloads in the data center and in the cloud. The survey shows more than half of respondents are engaging with multiple public cloud platforms and that 11 percent have hybrid workloads combining both on-premises and public cloud.

“Moving towards a single public cloud platform sounds tidy,” said Steve Francis, LogicMonitor Founder and Chief Evangelist. “The reality is much messier, with multiple cloud platforms, a mix of cloud and on-premises and even innovative solutions such as VMware Cloud for AWS and Azure Stack.”

What is the future of cloud?

Survey participants report that while on-premises is still the most popular option for managing workloads, that is rapidly changing. By 2020, respondents expect on-premises workloads to drop from 46 to 25 percent, while cloud grows from 44 to 67 percent. Hybrid, which is categorized as a computing environment that spans one (or more) clouds with one (or more) on-premises environments, remains about the same only growing from 11 to 12 percent.

Respondents identified the most important reasons to host workloads on-premises as security, cost and compliance, whereas the most important factors for choosing cloud include reliability, performance and flexibility.

Who are the major cloud providers?

The majority of respondents report using leading cloud vendors such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform either in production or experimenting with each platform.

In production:

• AWS (81 percent)
• Azure (28 percent)
• Google Cloud Platform (13 percent)
   

Experimenting:

• Google Cloud Platform (26 percent)
• Azure (19 percent)
• AWS (16 percent)
   

Combined (In-production and experimenting):

• AWS (97 percent)
• Azure (47 percent)
• Google Cloud Platform (39 percent)

Fifty-four percent of respondents report using multiple cloud platforms (either in production or experimenting). Twenty-eight percent are using multiple cloud platforms strictly in production. Additionally, respondents are starting to use new variants of the major cloud platforms, including Azure Stack (24 percent are at least experimenting) and VMware on AWS (22 percent).

The survey shows there is strong interest in engaging with multiple public cloud platforms.  Respondents highlighted the top reasons for choosing to run in a multi-cloud environment:

• More cost-effective
• Redundancy
• Security
• To find the optimal application environment
• Better reliability and reduced latency
   

“There is no one-size-fits-all for public cloud,” said Sarah Terry, Senior Product Manager at LogicMonitor. “Each platform has its strengths and organizations are picking and choosing to fit their needs.”

It appears respondents are a long way from a single public cloud platform handling all of their organization’s needs. When asked how long they thought their organization would include a mix of cloud and on-premises workloads, one-third of respondents say six or more years and one in five say 10 years or more.