State of the Cloud report 2016 by RightScale

This report illustrates the findings of a large scale survey conducted by RightScale in 2016, regarding the adoption of cloud computing. In total, 1,060 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations took part in the survey. The findings identified by this report are crucial in terms of presenting the state-of-the-art on cloud computing and its possible future evolution.

Some key findings according to RightScale’ s report are:

Hybrid cloud adoption grew significantly.

• Private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent to 77 percent, driving hybrid cloud adoption  up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year.
• 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, holding steady from 2015.
• 95 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with  infrastructure-as-a-service.

Cloud users leverage 6 clouds on average.

• Cloud users are running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds.
• They are experimenting with an additional 1.5 public clouds and 1.3 private clouds.

More enterprise workloads shift to cloud, especially private cloud.

• 17 percent of enterprises now have more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, up from 13 percent  in 2015.
• Private cloud showed even stronger growth with 31 percent of enterprises running more  than 1,000 VMs, up from 22 percent in 2015.

Enterprises increase alignment on role of central IT teams in cloud use.

• Enterprise business units increasingly acknowledge the role of central IT to set policies  (up from 31 percent to 44 percent year-over-year), select public clouds (up from 34 percent  to 42 percent), and select private cloud technologies (up from 35 percent to 44 percent).
• With greater alignment comes progress on cloud governance, as 38 percent of respondents  have now established approval policies for cloud, up from 30 percent in 2015.

Security is no longer the top cloud challenge.

• Lack of resources/expertise is now the #1 cloud challenge (cited by 32 percent), supplanting  security (cited by 29 percent).
• Even the most security conscious respondents ‘” enterprise central IT teams and security pros  ‘” no longer see security as the #1 challenge.

You can read the full report here.