The march toward cloud adoption, which started well before the pandemic, continues apace, according to research from technology and business training company O’Reilly. According to the global 2021 Cloud Adoption Survey, 90% of respondents report that their organizations use cloud computing, up from 88% last year. Further, almost half (48%) say they plan to migrate 50% or more of their applications to the cloud in the coming year, with 20% planning to migrate all applications.
The most proactive industries when it comes to cloud adoption are retail and ecommerce, finance and banking, and software. The most cloud-averse are electronics and hardware and government.
Among all respondents, 47% say their organizations are pursuing a cloud-first strategy, with 30% already cloud native (with applications built to run in a scalable cloud environment). Another 37% plan to be cloud native within three or more years. Only 5% are engaged in cloud “”repatriation”” (bringing services that were moved to the cloud back in-house).
Two-thirds of respondents (67%) are using a public cloud provider, up from 61% in 2020. Forty-five percent are using a private cloud, a 10% increase over 2020 (35%), with 29% using a hybrid cloud (a drop from last year’s 39%) and 23% using multicloud (roughly the same year over year). In addition, 55% are using traditionally managed on-premises infrastructure. (Note that respondents could select multiple answers.)
Amazon Web Services (62%), Microsoft Azure (48%), and Google Cloud Platform (33%) are the most popular cloud solutions, and most respondents use multiple cloud providers.
According to respondents who are using public cloud, the top concern in almost every industry is managing cost (30%), followed by modernizing applications using public cloud containers, and optimizing cloud performance.
The top three challenges cited by respondents not leveraging cloud computing are: regulatory requirements to keep data on premises (21%), migration concerns and risks (19%), and cost (19%). Among industries, government is the biggest user of traditionally managed on-premises infrastructure (72%).
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