Over half of IT pros prefer hybrid and multi-cloud architectures - report

Over half of IT professionals across the world prefer hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, according to a new report from Denodo.

The research includes a survey of over 250 organisations, quizzed on their attitudes toward cloud, the challenges it presents, and the way in which it has changed workflows within organisations.

53% of the study's respondents embrace hybrid and multi-cloud as their favourite form of deployment. This is consistent with actual deployment statistics, which indicate hybrid cloud configurations constitute 42% of all cloud deployments.

Public cloud comes in at second (18%), while private clouds round out the list with 17%.

When asked their views on the advantages of hybrid and multi-cloud configurations, respondents cited the ability to diversify spend and skills, the build-up of resiliency, and the ability to cherry-pick features depending on each cloud service provider's strength.

In the APAC region, 27% of respondents opined that security and governance was the primary general cloud challenge their organisation faced, followed by limited cloud skills (24%).

The report found that Google Cloud has a larger presence in APAC, while Microsoft Azure held more sway in the EMEA and LATAM regions.

The use of container technologies increased by 50% year-over-year, indicating a growing trend to use it for scalability and portability to the cloud.

DevOps professionals continue to look to containerization for production, because it enables reproducibility and the ability to automate deployments, according to Denodo.

It also enjoys significant penetration, with 80% of respondents claiming they leverage some type of container deployment, with Docker being the most popular (46%) followed by Kubernetes (40%).

Over the past year, there has been a positive reinforcement of cloud adoption with at least a 10% increase across beginners, intermediate, and advanced adopters.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure jointly hold a huge 90% of the new-entrant market, according to Denodo.

But users are not just lifting their on-premises applications and shifting them to either of or both of these clouds; more than a third (35%) said they would re-architect their applications for the best-fit cloud architecture.

Analytics and BI are at the top of the list when it comes to specific cloud initiatives, holding 66% of respondents' favour, who claim to use it for big data analytics projects.

This use case was followed closely by both logical data warehouse (43%) and data science (41%).

Cloud marketplaces are also enjoying a boost in popularity, with half of respondents saying they leverage them - with utility/pay-as-you-go pricing was the most popular incentive (19%), followed by its self-service capability/ability to minimize IT dependency (13%).

"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 (43%)," says Denodo senior vice president and chief marketing officer Ravi Shankar.

"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 cloud integration and migration strategy.