Hybrid cloud the most popular deployment path - study

Hybrid cloud is the most popular form of cloud deployment, indicating that it has become the 'de-facto' standard for enterprises.

The 2020 Denodo Global Cloud Study polled 250 enterprise organisations across Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East - Africa, and North America. The study found that hybrid cloud deployments account for 42% of configurations, followed by public could (18%) and private cloud (17%).

According to respondents, hybrid cloud offers the ability to diversity spend and IT skills, to choose features based on a service provider's strengths, and to build resiliency.

The study frames one aspect of cloud adoption maturity in terms of how many organisations run some kind of workload in the cloud – 78% of respondents state they currently do so. In the past year, the survey reports a 10% increase across beginner, intermediate, and advanced cloud adopters.

Additionally, 90% of organisations use Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure for tasks including the shift of on-premise applications to cloud, and 35% say they would rearchitect their applications for best-fit cloud architecture.

The majority (66%) of respondents say they are using cloud to leverage analytics and business intelligence, followed by logical data warehousing (42%) and data science (41%).

"As data's centre of gravity shifts to the cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures are becoming the basis of data management, but the challenge of integrating data in the cloud has almost doubled (42%)," says Denodo SVP and CMO Ravi Shankar.

In terms of data formats, 68% of used data is structured, however unstructured data is growing in importance.

Cloud object storage (47%) along with SaaS data (44%) are frequently used to maximize ease of computation and performance optimisation, the report suggests.

Further, cloud marketplaces are growing at a phenomenal speed and are becoming more popular. Half (50%) of those surveyed are leveraging cloud marketplaces with utility/pay-as-you-go-pricing being the most popular incentive (19%) followed by its self-service capability/ability to minimise IT dependency (13%). Avoiding a long-term commitment also played a role (6%).

"Today, users are looking to simplify cloud data integration in a hybrid/multi-cloud environment without having to depend on heavy duty data migration or replication which may be why almost 50% of respondents said they are considering data virtualisation as a key part of their migration strategy.

The survey states that more than 60% of the respondents are concerned about the cost implication of software in the cloud, and this ties directly to license management capabilities and clarity.

Another 30-40% of respondents are not sure if they can easily validate the value of the cloud solution via a proof of concept, nor can they easily understand the impact of the workload scaling on license costs.

One fourth of respondents would prefer managed services (SaaS) for less dependency on IT or cloud-specific skills.