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2015 State of the Cloud Report

Kim Weins

Enterprises are increasingly implementing a hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses public and private clouds as well as existing virtualized environments, according to the 2015 State of the Cloud Survey conducted by RightScale.

Although more enterprise workloads are currently deployed in private clouds, public clouds are used more broadly and are expected to attract new workloads at a faster rate.

Highlights of the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report include:

Cloud is ubiquitous, hybrid cloud is the preferred strategy: 93 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service; 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy (up from 74 percent in 2014).

Public clouds are used by more organizations while private cloud runs more workloads: 88 percent of organizations use public cloud compared with 63 percent that use private cloud; 13 percent of enterprises run more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, while 22 percent of organizations run more than 1,000 VMs in private cloud.

Significant headroom for more enterprise workloads to move to the cloud: 68 percent of enterprises run less than a fifth of their application portfolio in the cloud; 55 percent of enterprises report that a significant portion of their existing application portfolio is not in cloud, but is built with cloud-friendly architectures.

Enterprise central IT teams take the reins to broker cloud services: 62 percent of enterprises report that central IT makes the majority of cloud spending decisions; 43 percent of IT teams are offering a self-service portal for access to cloud services, with an additional 41 percent planning or developing a portal.

DevOps rises; Docker soars: Overall DevOps adoption has risen to 66 percent, with enterprises reaching 71 percent; Chef and Puppet are used by 28 and 24 percent of organizations respectively; Docker, in its first year, is already used by 13 percent of organizations with a whopping 35 percent of organizations planning to use.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate in public cloud, but Azure makes inroads among enterprises: AWS adoption is 57 percent, while Azure IaaS is second at 12 percent vs.6 percent in 2014; Among enterprise respondents, Azure IaaS narrows the gap with 19 percent adoption as compared to AWS with 50 percent; Google’s IaaS offering shows the faster growth among enterprises, increasing from 4 percent in 2014 to 9 percent in 2015.

Private cloud stalls in 2015 with only small changes in adoption: Respondents reported minimal changes in adoption of private cloud technologies from 2014. VMware vSphere continues to lead with 53 percent of enterprise respondents reporting that they use it as a private cloud. Enterprises using OpenStack shows the largest increase for 2015, growing by 3 percent. The new Azure Pack offering shows strong use in its first year, used by 11 percent of enterprises.

“The tide of enterprise cloud adoption has shifted from shadow IT to strategic adoption led by central IT teams,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "As enterprise IT has become more open to public cloud and more comfortable with cloud security, it is now in a strong position to broker cloud services to internal customers and drive cloud adoption forward. In the next year organizations expect to shift more workloads to cloud, with public cloud workloads growing faster than private cloud."

Survey Methodology: RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey in January 2015. The survey questioned technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. The 930 respondents range from technical executives to managers and practitioners and represent organizations of varying sizes across many industries. Respondents represent companies across the cloud spectrum, including both users (24 percent) and non-users (76 percent) of RightScale solutions. Their answers provide a comprehensive perspective on the state of the cloud today. The margin of error is 3.2 percent.

Kim Weins is VP of Marketing at RightScale.

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2015 State of the Cloud Report

Kim Weins

Enterprises are increasingly implementing a hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses public and private clouds as well as existing virtualized environments, according to the 2015 State of the Cloud Survey conducted by RightScale.

Although more enterprise workloads are currently deployed in private clouds, public clouds are used more broadly and are expected to attract new workloads at a faster rate.

Highlights of the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report include:

Cloud is ubiquitous, hybrid cloud is the preferred strategy: 93 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service; 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy (up from 74 percent in 2014).

Public clouds are used by more organizations while private cloud runs more workloads: 88 percent of organizations use public cloud compared with 63 percent that use private cloud; 13 percent of enterprises run more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, while 22 percent of organizations run more than 1,000 VMs in private cloud.

Significant headroom for more enterprise workloads to move to the cloud: 68 percent of enterprises run less than a fifth of their application portfolio in the cloud; 55 percent of enterprises report that a significant portion of their existing application portfolio is not in cloud, but is built with cloud-friendly architectures.

Enterprise central IT teams take the reins to broker cloud services: 62 percent of enterprises report that central IT makes the majority of cloud spending decisions; 43 percent of IT teams are offering a self-service portal for access to cloud services, with an additional 41 percent planning or developing a portal.

DevOps rises; Docker soars: Overall DevOps adoption has risen to 66 percent, with enterprises reaching 71 percent; Chef and Puppet are used by 28 and 24 percent of organizations respectively; Docker, in its first year, is already used by 13 percent of organizations with a whopping 35 percent of organizations planning to use.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate in public cloud, but Azure makes inroads among enterprises: AWS adoption is 57 percent, while Azure IaaS is second at 12 percent vs.6 percent in 2014; Among enterprise respondents, Azure IaaS narrows the gap with 19 percent adoption as compared to AWS with 50 percent; Google’s IaaS offering shows the faster growth among enterprises, increasing from 4 percent in 2014 to 9 percent in 2015.

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“The tide of enterprise cloud adoption has shifted from shadow IT to strategic adoption led by central IT teams,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "As enterprise IT has become more open to public cloud and more comfortable with cloud security, it is now in a strong position to broker cloud services to internal customers and drive cloud adoption forward. In the next year organizations expect to shift more workloads to cloud, with public cloud workloads growing faster than private cloud."

Survey Methodology: RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey in January 2015. The survey questioned technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. The 930 respondents range from technical executives to managers and practitioners and represent organizations of varying sizes across many industries. Respondents represent companies across the cloud spectrum, including both users (24 percent) and non-users (76 percent) of RightScale solutions. Their answers provide a comprehensive perspective on the state of the cloud today. The margin of error is 3.2 percent.

Kim Weins is VP of Marketing at RightScale.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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