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.

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Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

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