Hybrid cloud the most preferred cloud deployment — survey

Hybrid cloud is the preferred cloud deployment globally for organisations, according to new research from Denodo.

35% of respondents in a March 2021 survey of 150 global business and IT professionals picked hybrid as their dominant choice, followed by private cloud at 24%, public cloud at 16%, and multi-cloud at 9%.

The report also revealed a jump in organisations moving advanced workloads to the cloud — increasing by 25% year-over-year between 2020 and 2021. Denodo says this statistic in particular suggests that organisations are becoming more confident about moving their important workloads to the cloud.

AWS and Azure still hold the lion's share of the cloud market (65% combined), while others like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are slowly catching up.

Marketplaces are also gaining popularity, with almost half (45%) of respondents leveraging them to take advantage of various incentives, including low upfront investments and risks. Utility/pay-as-you-go pricing is the most popular motivation at 35%, followed by its self-service capability/ability to minimise IT dependency (25%), and simplified procurement (14%). Avoiding a long-term commitment was also a motivator at 6%.

So what are organisations using the cloud for? The top two use cases, Denodo reports, are analytics and infrastructure, and AI/ML.

In particular, AI/ML and stream processing use cases are showcasing their importance on how businesses are using those technologies for their day-to-day operations, as year-over-year growth for each ranged between 50 and 100%. Close to 50% of participants leverage multiple solutions for data integration in the cloud, the most popular ones being data lakes, ETL pipeline, cloud data warehouse and object storage.

The report also notes that with a larger percentage of organisations embracing the cloud, IT processes are steadily becoming more automated and agile — especially through the adoption of microservices and containers.

"While we already know that cloud has become an inevitable force in IT infrastructure management, with cloud migration challenges abound, organisations often do not have a clear path to cloud adoption," says Denodo senior vice president and chief marketing officer Ravi Shankar.

"For the last four years, our audience has been sharing how they see the path to a successful infrastructure modernisation unfolding.

"Just like majority of our audience, I personally believe that a well laid out logical data fabric, created with data virtualisation, may be the key to helping organisations embrace a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy that is easy to deploy, manage, and maintain.