OREANDA-NEWS. March 30, 2016.  There are a lot of barometers of cloud adoption these days, and one that we look forward to seeing each year is the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report. RightScale, an Equinix partner, surveys over 1,000 large enterprises and small and medium (SMB) businesses about their moves into the cloud. When we compare the RightScale findings with other analyst surveys, and our own experiences at Equinix, we see similar trends among cloud adopters.

One important indicator that the RightScale report cites is the prevalence of multi-cloud strategies. RightScale says 82% of companies are deploying multi-cloud strategies, and that concurs with the findings from the Equinix Enterprise of the Future survey, which also shows interconnection as a critical factor in multi-cloud deployment.

We also agree with the RightScale results indicating that hybrid clouds are a huge part of multi-cloud adoption – hybrid cloud adoption rose from 58% of those surveyed in 2015 to 71% of those surveyed this year. This growth is fueled by the increase of private cloud usage from 63% to 77% of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees. Companies with less than 1,000 employees are drawn more to public cloud usage ̶ 53% of SMBs run a majority of cloud workloads in public environments, compared to 32% of large enterprises.

In looking at the number of cloud offerings that companies are deploying or planning to deploy, the RightScale respondents averaged a total of six clouds (three public and three private) per company. More than half of these companies said that they will be moving more workloads into the cloud in 2016. Similar numbers were seen in Dimensional Research’s report on cloud deployment, with half of IT professionals reporting that they were deploying somewhere between 3 and 10 cloud services in 2015.

The top five benefits of the cloud cited by the RightScale report include:

  • Faster access to infrastructure (62%)
  • Greater scalability (58%)
  • Higher available (52%)
  • Faster time to market (52%)
  • Business continuity (41%)

The takeaway here is that companies are no longer solely focused on cost as a primary driver/benefit ̶ it’s now all about speed, agility, scalability and reliability.

And with experience comes greater appreciation of these cloud benefits. The respondents who cited these benefits in the greatest numbers were “cloud-focused” companies that are “heavily using cloud infrastructure.” This was compared to companies that are just formulating cloud strategies, testing out cloud proof-of-concepts or are in the process of expanding their current cloud deployments.

Security still ranked high on the cloud challenges list, coming in second behind the lack of cloud personnel resources and expertise. Compliance, managing multiple cloud services, managing costs, the complexity of building a private cloud and governance/control were also named as significant challenges, with one fourth of the companies saying these were common cloud concerns. The good news is that as cloud benefits increased among the more cloud-savvy companies, these users found the cloud challenges decreased year over year.

At Equinix, we find common ground with the many companies surveyed (better than half) that are using or planning to use the Docker container technology to migrate applications to the cloud. In our blog, “Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Migration Contained,” we talk about how we leverage Docker technology as our core container strategy.

Based on the RightScale report, other industry analyst reports and our own experiences, the cloud market is clearly on a steep trajectory toward greater opportunity and growth. Read more about our customers’ cloud adoption success stories.