Why most businesses have adopted multi-cloud strategies for critical applications

Virtustream announced the findings of a new April 2019 study, "Multi-cloudStrategies Drive Mission-Critical Benefits", revealing that 97 per cent of respondents are employing multi-cloud strategies for mission-critical applications and nearly two-thirds are using multiple vendors for mission-critical workloads. 
 
The Virtustream-commissioned study was conducted by Forrester Consulting and is based on a global survey of more than 700 cloud technology decision makers at businesses with more than 500 employees. The study examines the current state of enterprise IT strategies for cloud-based workloads and details the increasing interest and needs of IT decision makers for multi-use cloud architectures.
 
Multi-cloud Investments are on the Rise
 
The study shows that multi-cloud deployments are here to stay, and investments look to increase over the next two years. Budgets for staffing, training and investments in multi-cloud strategies are on the rise, causing organisations to add new expertise and skills around maintenance, implementation and cost optimisation. Almost 90 per cent of organisations predict they'll maintain or increase their investment and staffing for multi-cloud deployments over the next two years. Specifically, 87 per cent will maintain or increase training investment and 88 per cent will maintain or increase investment in managed service support.
 
Study Finds Big Business Benefits Associated with Multi-cloud for Mission-Critical Applications
 
A significant number of enterprises say they are using multi-cloud strategies today for mission-critical applications, with the top-ranked use cases centring on customer and financial data, in addition to sales applications. This wave of adoption has raised confidence in using multi-cloud solutions for mission-critical applications – in fact, nearly 75 per cent of organisations say they are using two to three cloud providers today for those business-critical applications.
 
Surveyed IT leaders showed a diverse set of use cases for their multi-cloud strategies and believe such an approach yields broad benefits, from increased performance and agility to improved efficiency and costs. Performance and cost savings ranked as the top success metrics organisations use for evaluating these strategies. The third most cited benefit of multi-cloud is the ability to quickly and efficiently respond to changes and challenges within the business.

Security and Management Challenges Top List of Concerns

Multi-cloud deployments are complex, and nearly all surveyed organisations experienced issues with deploying and using multiple cloud environments. Although 61 per cent feel their multi-cloud strategy is well aligned to their business objectives, security and management challenges are still reflected as the top issues with use, migration and deployment. In response, organisations are looking to add staff with specific multi-cloud experience and to work with cloud vendors with expertise and managed service offerings.