According to one annual cloud usage survey, public and multi-cloud were trailing in global adoption.

In the pandemic-driven hasty-digitalization era, organizations are compelled to accelerate their cloud journey to take advantage of its flexibility, control costs, speed time-to-market, and to simplify data management. Yet, the path chosen makes all the difference.

This is the finding of a small survey in Mar 2021 of cloud usage by Denodo, conducted across 150 global business and IT professionals from various industry sectors.

From the data, hybrid-cloud deployment was the dominant choice, accounting for 35% of respondents. Private cloud usage came in at 24%, followed by public cloud, which remained almost flat at 16%. Finally, multi-cloud was used by 9% of respondents.

Findings to note

The number of organizations in the annual survey with some level of cloud adoption had remained steady year-over-year, while there was an increase of in the number of organizations moving advanced workloads to the cloud (19.59% in 2021 vs 15.48% in 2020).

  • Businesses in the survey were becoming more confident about moving their important workloads to the cloud. AWS and Azure held 65% of the cloud market while others like Google Cloud Platform were slowly catching up.
  • Marketplaces were becoming popular, with 45% of respondents leveraging them to take advantage of various incentives, including low upfront investments and risks.
  • Utility/pay-as-you-go pricing was the most popular motivation at 35% followed by self-service capability/ability to minimize IT dependency (25%), and simplified procurement (14%). Avoiding a long-term commitment was also a motivator at 6%.
  • Analytics & infrastructure usage, and AI/ML, were the top two use cases among respondents. Respondents were 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 respondents leveraged multiple solutions for data integration in the cloud, the most popular ones being data lakes, ETL pipeline, cloud data warehouse and object storage.
  • 50% of respondents indicated that they were using Docker for automation and portability. Kubernetes adoption was also increasing at a steady pace, because for many organizations, hundreds and at times thousands of microservices span both on-premises IT environments and multiple clouds.

Said Ravi Shankar, Senior Vice President and CMO, Denodo: “While we already know that the Cloud has become an inevitable force in IT infrastructure management, cloud migration challenges abound, and organizations often do not have a clear path to cloud adoption. For the last four years, our (survey participants) have been sharing how they see the path to a successful infrastructure modernization unfolding.”