The newest data on cloud computing shows that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are the reality for most businesses. This is backed up by our customers’ setups and reports from industry experts and analysts. At last week’s CloudHealth Connect18 in Boston, Dave Bartoletti, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, shared insights on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud using statistics:

  • 62% of public cloud adopters are using 2+ unique cloud environments/platforms
  • 74% of enterprises describe their strategy as hybrid/multi-cloud today
  • But only:
    • 42% regularly optimize cloud spending
    • 41% maintain an approved service catalog
    • 37% enforce capacity limits or expirations

Many public cloud users and businesses have chosen a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach to fulfill their cloud computing requirements. Using features and services from various cloud providers can help maximize the advantages of cloud services, but if not managed well, these strategies can lead to wasted time, money, and computing resources.

The data is telling – but we won’t stop there. For more insight on the rise of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, and to demonstrate the impact on cloud spend (and waste) – we have compiled a few more statistics on cloud computing.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Adoption Statistics

The statistics on cloud computing show that companies not only use multiple clouds today, but they have plans to expand multi- and hybrid cloud use in the future:

  • According to a 451 Research survey, 69% of organizations plan to run a multi-cloud environment by 2019. As they said, “the future of IT is multi-cloud and hybrid” – but with this rise, cloud spending optimization also becomes more of a challenge.
  • In a survey of nearly 1,000 tech executives and cloud practitioners, over 80% of companies were utilizing a multi-cloud strategy, commonly including a hybrid cloud model consisting of both public and private clouds.
  • And by multi-cloud, we don’t mean just two. On average, the number of private and public clouds used by companies to run applications and test out new services is 4.8.
  • On hybrid cloud strategy:
    • 83% of workloads are virtualized today (IDC)
    • 60% of large enterprises run VMs in the public cloud (IDC)
    • 65% of organizations have a hybrid cloud strategy today (IDC)

Cloud Spend Statistics

As enterprises’ cloud footprints expand, so too does their spending:

  • It’s not just public – the rise in cloud spend is happening on all fronts. According to IDC, 62.3 percent of private cloud spending went to on-premise private clouds in 2017.
  • The increase in cloud use, along with the rise of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies, also correlates with an increased investment in cloud services. In a survey of nearly 1,000 tech executives and cloud practitioners, 20% of enterprises plan to increase their cloud spend by more than double, and another 17% plan to up their cloud spending by 50-100%, according to the report.
  • 75% of participants said that one of their primary concerns was the challenge of managing cloud spend. Cloud cost optimization was a priority for the majority of participants, and average cloud waste was reported at 35%.
  • In another study from 451 Research, 38.8% of CIOs said that “cost savings” was their biggest motivator in migrating to the cloud, but post migration, cloud costs was the biggest challenge they faced. Here’s what else they had to say:

“Cloud is an inexpensive and easily accessible technology. People consume more, thereby spending more, and forget to control or limit their consumption. With ease of access, inevitably some resources get orphaned with no ownership; these continue to incur costs. Some resources are overprovisioned to provide extra capacity as a ‘just in case’ solution. Unexpected line items, such as bandwidth, are consumed. The IT department has limited visibility or control of these items.”

What Does ParkMyCloud User Data Tell Us?

We’ve noticed some interesting patterns in the cloud platforms adopted by ParkMyCloud users as well, which highlight the multi-cloud trends discussed above as well as correlations between the types of companies that are attracted to each of the major public clouds. We observed:

  • A high rate of growth in the number of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers over the past several months. While Amazon Web Services still holds the lion’s share among organizations using ParkMyCloud, the rate of growth is much higher for GCP. We believe that as more and larger organizations become enmeshed in GCP’s infrastructure, they are finding a greater need for cost optimization.
  • Among our customers using a multi-cloud strategy, the majority use AWS in combination with Azure, while the rest are using AWS with Google Cloud Platform.
  • The company profiles of AWS and GCP users are similar – we find these to be tech-forward small/medium businesses, whereas Azure attracts a larger proportion of big enterprises.

What These Statistics on Cloud Computing Mean for Cloud Management

Upon examining these statistics on cloud computing, it’s clear that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches are not just the future, they’re the current state of affairs. While this offers plenty of advantages to organizations looking to benefit from different cloud capabilities, using more than one CSP complicates governance, cost optimization, and cloud management further as native CSP tools are not multi-cloud. As cloud costs remain a primary concern, it’s crucial for organizations to stay ahead with insight into cloud usage trends to manage spend (and prevent waste). To keep costs in check for a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment, optimization tools that can track usage and spend across different cloud providers are a CIO’s best friend.