The findings clearly demonstrate the need for organisations to pursue a diverse, and properly considered, range of information management and security strategies. The study, commissioned by Veritas and conducted by Cicero Group, surveyed 1,800 global IT decision makers in organizations with at least 500+ employees and at least 75TB of data under management.
The study examined both the rate at which organizations are moving data to the cloud, utilizing both private and public cloud services, as well as the reasoning behind their decisions. The study also found that business-critical workloads, such as CRM and ERP operations, are moving to the public cloud at the same rate as less critical workloads. This runs counter to industry expectation, which predicted less important workloads would be migrated to the public cloud first, and faster.
Key findings:
- 38 per cent of workloads today exist in a private cloud, with 28 per cent in a public cloud. These numbers are expected to grow at rates of 7 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively, over the next twelve months. - 74 per cent of enterprises are currently using two or more cloud infrastructure vendors to support their workload requirements and 23 per cent are using four or more vendors. This means that the burden of protecting, managing and utilizing the data across these heterogeneous environments will fall largely on IT departments.
- Geographically, Japan and Brazil are leading when it comes to leveraging the public cloud, with roughly 50 per cent more workloads moving to the public cloud than the U.S., Canada, France and Germany.
- When examined by industry, manufacturing led the way in migration to the public cloud with 30 per cent of their workloads in the public cloud, as compared to 24 per cent in telecommunications, 23 per cent in both healthcare and financial and 16 per cent in the public sector.
- More than one-third of respondents reported that cost is the primary driver for moving to the public cloud, while the top inhibitor to public cloud use remains security, with 50 per cent reporting that security/protection architectures is still the top reason for avoiding the public cloud. Interestingly, of those who have adopted public cloud, security was the top driver of satisfaction with their decision, highlighting, perhaps, that public cloud vendors need to better articulate and promote their security capabilities and successes.
- A sizeable number of respondents noted that certain workloads would always remain on-premises rather than migrating to the cloud. 28 per cent stated that backup and recovery will remain on-premises, 27 per cent said they will keep disaster recovery out of the cloud and 26 per cent will continue to house archive, data warehousing and relational or OLTP databases on-premises.
- 81 per cent of enterprises rely on service providers for help with cloud implementation, as well as ongoing operations, indicating that the heterogeneous and “messy” nature of cloud will continue to be a challenge for IT departments, and service providers with high levels of support and skills will be invaluable to organizations, particularly as they migrate workloads to the public cloud.
“This research underlines the current state of the hybrid cloud world,” said Simon Jelley, Veritas VP of Product Management, Veritas Technologies. “This world is more – not less – heterogeneous, which can mean increasing complexity from an information management perspective. Organisations must be more vigilant than ever in identifying IT blind spots and potential security risks to avoid unplanned downtime or an information crisis.”
