Slow up, Slow down

Hybrid remains the most dominant strategy for cloud adoption going forward, according to the survey. The percentage of enterprises that have a strategy to use multiple clouds grew to 85%, from 82% last year. Most (58%) plan to go for hybrid. There is a declining trend in planned investment in private cloud. While those planning multiple private cloud has come down from 7% to 11%, there is a drop from 6% to 5% in planned investment in a single private cloud. Public cloud investment is likely to gain from this trend.

Benefits from cloud, as perceived by the users, do not seem to have undergone a major shift, with faster access, scalability and availability being seen as top benefits accrued, as in 2016.

There has been a sharp drop in perceived challenges, as compared to just a year back. Lack of resources which was seen as a challenge by one out of every three respondents last year has come down significantly, as only one out of four respondent this year identified it as a challenge. However, that still remains one of the top challenges. Another challenge that has sharply come down in the eyes of the IT professionals is complexity of building a private cloud. Security and managing costs are seen as other top challenges.

AWS leads in public cloud adoption despite staying flat for the last two years in the number of respondents using it. However, respondents are running more VMs in AWS than in other public clouds, which explains the AWS lead in revenue. Azure made strong gains in adoption in this year’s survey, closing the lead on AWS. Google also made gains and still remains in the #3 position.

VMware vSphere continues to lead as a private cloud option (both in adoption and number of VMs), despite declines in adoption from last year. OpenStack made a small amount of progress in enterprises, but Azure Pack/Stack stood out with the strongest growth year-over-year.