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.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Exploring AI Observability – Part 5: Roles

AI observability serves several roles across an organization. AI engineers use it to build, evaluate, and improve AI systems. SREs use it to operate those systems reliably and efficiently in production, including managing their cost. Leaders need it to connect AI behavior and operational performance to business outcomes. The common need is a clear understanding of whether AI systems are delivering the intended result ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 4: Challenges

Part 4 outlines the challenges enterprise face when adopting AI observability. The main challenge is that AI complexity compounds at every stage of maturity. LLM-based applications introduce new behavior, dependencies, and quality considerations, while Agentic AI adds further failure modes as systems make decisions and take actions ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 3: The Current State of AI Observability

Part 3 reports on the current state of AI observability. Most experts agree: enterprises are moving faster with AI than they are with the operational discipline needed to run it safely ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 2: Traditional vs. AI Observability

When discussing AI Observability, one of the first questions that arises: Is this just an extension of traditional observability or is this a whole new type of tool? Part 2 compares traditional observability with AI observability ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 1: Why It Matters

In this extensive 14-part series that will post over the next three weeks, experts across observability and AI will provide insight and opinions on the need for AI Observability, the challenges, the benefits, the current state, and predictions for the future ...

AgenticOps Scaling Quickly in the Enterprise

Amid rising complexity, organizations are moving quickly toward agent-driven operations: AgenticOps, according to The Impact of Agentic AI on Network Operations, a new report from Cisco ...

Why Better Technology Won't Fix a Broken Workflow

AI, automation, and enterprise software give organizations an extraordinary amount of leverage. Work that once required hours can happen in minutes. Information buried across systems can be analyzed almost instantly. Complex workflows can be coordinated across teams with far less manual intervention. That leverage creates a temptation to start with the technology ...

What If AI's Biggest Competitive Advantage Isn't the Model?

Everyone wants to talk about models. Compute clusters. Benchmark scores that climb a fraction of a point and make headlines anyway. It's an easy conversation to have because it's measurable. But it's also increasingly beside the point ...

Why Going All-In on Cloud No Longer Works in the Age of AI

For more than a decade, the default infrastructure play has been simple. Move more workloads to the cloud, retire on-premises gear and treat the data center as a cost to shrink. That logic held while public cloud offered near-limitless capacity at predictable prices, and AI demand is now testing both halves of that assumption ...

Visibility Is Not a Strategy - What Matters Is What Happens Next

Most enterprise IT leaders can tell you exactly how many applications are running across their organization. They can surface a dashboard showing telecom spend by region, pull a report on SaaS license utilization, or call up a real-time view of mobile device inventory. The data is there, and IT leaders have largely delivered on the promise of visibility. Yet, in most organizations, that visibility has not translated into business value ...

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.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Exploring AI Observability – Part 5: Roles

AI observability serves several roles across an organization. AI engineers use it to build, evaluate, and improve AI systems. SREs use it to operate those systems reliably and efficiently in production, including managing their cost. Leaders need it to connect AI behavior and operational performance to business outcomes. The common need is a clear understanding of whether AI systems are delivering the intended result ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 4: Challenges

Part 4 outlines the challenges enterprise face when adopting AI observability. The main challenge is that AI complexity compounds at every stage of maturity. LLM-based applications introduce new behavior, dependencies, and quality considerations, while Agentic AI adds further failure modes as systems make decisions and take actions ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 3: The Current State of AI Observability

Part 3 reports on the current state of AI observability. Most experts agree: enterprises are moving faster with AI than they are with the operational discipline needed to run it safely ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 2: Traditional vs. AI Observability

When discussing AI Observability, one of the first questions that arises: Is this just an extension of traditional observability or is this a whole new type of tool? Part 2 compares traditional observability with AI observability ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 1: Why It Matters

In this extensive 14-part series that will post over the next three weeks, experts across observability and AI will provide insight and opinions on the need for AI Observability, the challenges, the benefits, the current state, and predictions for the future ...

AgenticOps Scaling Quickly in the Enterprise

Amid rising complexity, organizations are moving quickly toward agent-driven operations: AgenticOps, according to The Impact of Agentic AI on Network Operations, a new report from Cisco ...

Why Better Technology Won't Fix a Broken Workflow

AI, automation, and enterprise software give organizations an extraordinary amount of leverage. Work that once required hours can happen in minutes. Information buried across systems can be analyzed almost instantly. Complex workflows can be coordinated across teams with far less manual intervention. That leverage creates a temptation to start with the technology ...

What If AI's Biggest Competitive Advantage Isn't the Model?

Everyone wants to talk about models. Compute clusters. Benchmark scores that climb a fraction of a point and make headlines anyway. It's an easy conversation to have because it's measurable. But it's also increasingly beside the point ...

Why Going All-In on Cloud No Longer Works in the Age of AI

For more than a decade, the default infrastructure play has been simple. Move more workloads to the cloud, retire on-premises gear and treat the data center as a cost to shrink. That logic held while public cloud offered near-limitless capacity at predictable prices, and AI demand is now testing both halves of that assumption ...

Visibility Is Not a Strategy - What Matters Is What Happens Next

Most enterprise IT leaders can tell you exactly how many applications are running across their organization. They can surface a dashboard showing telecom spend by region, pull a report on SaaS license utilization, or call up a real-time view of mobile device inventory. The data is there, and IT leaders have largely delivered on the promise of visibility. Yet, in most organizations, that visibility has not translated into business value ...