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Cloud Adoption Trends Revealed in New Survey

What’s driving cloud migrations and which clouds are most popular? What are the most common use cases? These and other trends are revealed in a new global survey.

• By James E. Powell
• March 28, 2019

The second annual Denodo Global Cloud Survey, released this week, reveals that the pace for cloud adoption is picking up. More than half (51 percent) of companies responding said they are in the intermediate or advanced stages of cloud adoption, with a quarter new to the cloud and just getting started with their evaluation. Only just shy of 5 percent say they have no near-term plans to move to the cloud.

Once enterprises have decided to move to the cloud, it’s time to consider the type of cloud deployment model or strategy to use -- typically more than one. Nearly half (46 percent) are considering a hybrid cloud environment. About one-third of enterprises are considering a private cloud, with a third considering a multicloud environment and another third thinking about employing a public cloud.

What’s driving this trend? The survey points to cost optimization as the top reason for considering a multicloud architecture (cited by 54 percent of respondents). Forty-six percent are looking for a best-in-class workload offering, and 39 percent want to avoid vendor lock-in.

What are they using the cloud for? More than half (56 percent) have a data warehouse in the cloud, 48 percent have a data lake there, and 45 percent use it for machine learning. However, use cases vary by platform. Those using AWS put analytics/BI at the top of their list, followed by data lakes second and hybrid integration third. Those using Azure also have analytics/BI at the top but switch the other two.

In the competitive world of cloud providers, AWS was the leader among survey respondents; two-thirds (67 percent) consider it as their main cloud provider, with Microsoft’s Azure coming in at 60 percent. Google Cloud was a distant third (at 26 percent) and IBM Cloud was named by just 12 percent.

Cloud benefits come with risks and challenges. Respondents cited security and governance, lack of cloud skills, and managing and tracking cloud spending as their top three. Speaking of security, two-thirds of respondents say they store sensitive data in public clouds.

The survey by the data virtualization firm polled 201 business executives and IT professionals from North America (60 percent), EMEA (30 percent), and the Asia Pacific region (10 percent) in January 2019. Nearly 20 percent work in financial services, another 15 percent were employed in education, and 15 percent more in transportation.

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