"Hybrid adoption is growing with companies using 6 different clouds on average," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, citing the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Survey. "More workloads are moving to public and private clouds; security concerns have abated; cloud cost management challenges are increasing; and Docker is showing phenomenal growth. We also saw changes in the public cloud provider landscape with #2 Azure gaining ground on leader AWS."

Highlights of the report include:

Hybrid Cloud Adoption Grew Significantly

Private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent to 77 percent, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year.

Cloud Users Leverage 6 Clouds on Average

Cloud users are running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds. They are experimenting with an additional 1.5 public clouds and 1.3 private clouds.

More Enterprise Workloads Shift to Cloud, Especially Private Cloud

17 percent of enterprises now have more than 1,000 VMs in public cloud, up from 13 percent in 2014. Private cloud showed even stronger growth with 31 percent of enterprises running more than 1,000 VMs, up from 22 percent in 2014.

Security Is No Longer the Top Cloud Challenge

Lack of resources/expertise is now the #1 cloud challenge (cited by 32 percent), supplanting security (cited by 29 percent).

Cloud Cost Challenges Increase, but Optimization Efforts Lag

26 percent of respondents identify cloud cost management as a significant challenge, a steady increase each year from 18 percent in 2013. Cloud cost management provides a significant opportunity for savings, since few companies are taking critical actions to optimize cloud costs, such as shutting down unused workloads or selecting lower-cost cloud or regions.

DevOps Grows and Docker Spreads Like Wildfire, Especially in the Enterprise

Overall DevOps adoption rises from 66 to 74 percent, with enterprises reaching 81 percent. Overall Docker adoption more than doubles to 27 percent vs. 13 percent in 2015; and another 35 percent have plans to use Docker.

AWS Continues to Lead in Public Cloud Adoption, but Azure (Iaas and PaaS) Gain Ground

Overall, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is used by 57 percent of respondents, flat from last year. Enterprise adoption of AWS grew from 50 percent to 56 percent while adoption by smaller businesses fell slightly from 61 percent to 58 percent. Azure IaaS grows strongly from 12 percent to 17 percent adoption, while Azure PaaS grows from 9 percent to 13 percent.

Private Cloud Adoption Grows Across All Providers

VMware vSphere continues to lead with strong year-over-year growth. 44 percent of all respondents report they use it as a private cloud. OpenStack and VMware vCloud Suite both show strong growth and remain tied at 19 percent adoption overall.

Survey Methodology: RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey in January 2016. The survey questioned technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. The 1,060 respondents range from technical executives to managers and practitioners and represent organizations of varying sizes across many industries. The margin of error is 3.07 percent.