The majority of commercial cloud customers use the services of several providers, among which Amazon is the leader. This emerges from the first “State of Cloud Strategy Survey”, the results of which the software provider HashiCorp presented on Wednesday. More than 3000 people worldwide took part in the survey. The questions range from the adaptation of the multi-cloud to the cloud providers used and concerns about data protection.
Multi-cloud on the rise
According to the survey, 76 percent of multi-cloud users are compared to 24 percent of single-cloud users – basic cloud use was apparently a prerequisite for participation. Large companies with more than 5000 employees are well above average with 90% multi-cloud usage. For example, a survey participant quoted by HashiCorp stated that certain cloud providers allowed experimentation with emerging technologies while the company used another provider for the brunt.
The respondents named digital transformation (34%) as the most common reason for multi-cloud use, followed by the avoidance of vendor lock-in at 30%. Further answers include cost reduction, scaling or the portability of data. The coronavirus pandemic, on the other hand, plays a minor role in multi-cloud adaptation: Only 7 percent named it as a factor.
AWS leads, privacy concerns remain
In the HashiCorp survey, Amazon Web Services (AWS) proves to be the most used cloud provider across different regions and industries with 88 percent – and the same number of respondents plan to use it in two years, although it is not clear whether it will be are the same people who are currently using AWS. In second place of the most used cloud providers are Microsoft Azure with 74 percent and Google Cloud with 61 percent.
The survey also addressed the concerns of cloud users: cost reasons are seen as the most restrictive factor in relation to the cloud (51%), but security concerns come second (47%). That differs depending on the industry, and in financial services, security comes first with 59 percent.
HashiCorp also identified the exact nature of the multi-cloud security concerns: data protection tops the list with 40 percent, followed by data theft (33%) and legal compliance (31%). Amazon recently won the controversial US government contract to store NSA data in the cloud and is in a conflict with Microsoft over it.
Data and methodology
HashiCorp is the company behind the infrastructure-as-code platform Terraform, and the service mesh HashiCorp Consul also comes from the same company. In February 2021, HashiCorp offered 300,000 people to participate in the State of Cloud Strategy Survey and received responses from 3,205 people around the world. In some cases, however, they did not answer all 34 questions. Most of the respondents say they work in the software or services sector (51%), in the financial sector (15%) or in the public sector (8%).
Further results of the cloud survey can be found at HashiCorp.
(May)
