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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

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For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 14, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud network observability... 

While companies adopt AI at a record pace, they also face the challenge of finding a smart and scalable way to manage its rapidly growing costs. This requires balancing the massive possibilities inherent in AI with the need to control cloud costs, aim for long-term profitability and optimize spending ...

Telecommunications is expanding at an unprecedented pace ... But progress brings complexity. As WanAware's 2025 Telecom Observability Benchmark Report reveals, many operators are discovering that modernization requires more than physical build outs and CapEx — it also demands the tools and insights to manage, secure, and optimize this fast-growing infrastructure in real time ...

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...