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Companies Choosing Multi-Cloud Approach, Survey Says

RightScale announced results of a new market study of over 600 companies to uncover how businesses are approaching cloud computing and what priorities they set for implementing their cloud strategies, revealing multi-cloud is the strategy of choice for businesses.

“Cloud infrastructure now dominates as the architecture for ‘the new IT’ – and companies big and small enjoy an unprecedented variety of options for deploying the best cloud solution to meet their business needs,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “No one-size-fits-all approach will work for everyone, which is why it’s important to choose a platform that will allow you freedom of choice now and into the future as you decide where and how to leverage infrastructure-as-a-service cloud providers.”

With adoption of cloud computing rising, businesses are becoming more sophisticated in their strategies for leveraging cloud technologies.

- More than 68 percent of survey respondents report that they are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy.

- 53 percent of respondents are pursuing a hybrid strategy that includes a combination of public and private clouds.

- Another 15 percent of respondents have a multi-cloud strategy that includes multiple public clouds, but no private clouds.

- Among the respondents that plan to use both public and private clouds, 55 percent prioritize their public and private cloud efforts equally, while 23 percent prioritize their private cloud initiatives and 22 percent prioritize their public cloud initiatives.

- 89 percent of the respondents report that public cloud will be included in their multi-cloud portfolio.

Among the 64 percent of respondents who plan to include a private cloud option as part of their cloud portfolio, open source private cloud solutions are taking the lead. 41 percent of those respondents plan to use only open source-based private cloud options (CloudStack, OpenStack or Eucalyptus), while another 29 percent plan to use a combination of open source and VMware options. 30 percent of those respondents plan to use VMware-only based private cloud options.

“We’ve seen an explosion in multi-cloud usage in the market, and among our own customer base,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “Many RightScale customers have already deployed multiple clouds, including private clouds, and those multi-cloud companies represent over 90% of cloud usage we manage. This means that cloud leaders are already using multiple clouds, and our survey shows that many more companies intend to employ that strategy. RightScale helps companies navigate and manage this complex landscape by offering support of eight public clouds and three private clouds. We are focused on continuing to evolve our platform and ecosystem to enable companies to take full advantage of infrastructure-as-a-service with more of the applications they use every day.”

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Companies Choosing Multi-Cloud Approach, Survey Says

RightScale announced results of a new market study of over 600 companies to uncover how businesses are approaching cloud computing and what priorities they set for implementing their cloud strategies, revealing multi-cloud is the strategy of choice for businesses.

“Cloud infrastructure now dominates as the architecture for ‘the new IT’ – and companies big and small enjoy an unprecedented variety of options for deploying the best cloud solution to meet their business needs,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “No one-size-fits-all approach will work for everyone, which is why it’s important to choose a platform that will allow you freedom of choice now and into the future as you decide where and how to leverage infrastructure-as-a-service cloud providers.”

With adoption of cloud computing rising, businesses are becoming more sophisticated in their strategies for leveraging cloud technologies.

- More than 68 percent of survey respondents report that they are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy.

- 53 percent of respondents are pursuing a hybrid strategy that includes a combination of public and private clouds.

- Another 15 percent of respondents have a multi-cloud strategy that includes multiple public clouds, but no private clouds.

- Among the respondents that plan to use both public and private clouds, 55 percent prioritize their public and private cloud efforts equally, while 23 percent prioritize their private cloud initiatives and 22 percent prioritize their public cloud initiatives.

- 89 percent of the respondents report that public cloud will be included in their multi-cloud portfolio.

Among the 64 percent of respondents who plan to include a private cloud option as part of their cloud portfolio, open source private cloud solutions are taking the lead. 41 percent of those respondents plan to use only open source-based private cloud options (CloudStack, OpenStack or Eucalyptus), while another 29 percent plan to use a combination of open source and VMware options. 30 percent of those respondents plan to use VMware-only based private cloud options.

“We’ve seen an explosion in multi-cloud usage in the market, and among our own customer base,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “Many RightScale customers have already deployed multiple clouds, including private clouds, and those multi-cloud companies represent over 90% of cloud usage we manage. This means that cloud leaders are already using multiple clouds, and our survey shows that many more companies intend to employ that strategy. RightScale helps companies navigate and manage this complex landscape by offering support of eight public clouds and three private clouds. We are focused on continuing to evolve our platform and ecosystem to enable companies to take full advantage of infrastructure-as-a-service with more of the applications they use every day.”

Hot Topic

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

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 ...

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 ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...