State of the Cloud 2018
March 08, 2018
Share this

Enterprise cloud spending will grow rapidly over the next year, and yet 35 percent of cloud spend is wasted, according to the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Survey.

“As a result, optimizing clouds costs is the top initiative for cloud users in 2018,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “Multi-cloud continues to be the preferred strategy for enterprises, with companies reporting that they use nearly five different clouds on average. With this multi-cloud approach, Azure is now nipping at AWS’ heels and, in fact, is in a dead heat with AWS among enterprises that are just beginning their cloud adoption.”

Key highlights from the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report include:

Average enterprise cloud spending increases: For enterprises (companies with more than 1,000 employees), 26 percent say they spend more than $6 million a year in the public cloud. Another 26 percent say they spend between $1.2 million and $6 million a year.

Enterprises plan to grow public cloud spend: 20 percent of enterprises (companies with more than 1,000 employees) plan to more than double public cloud spend. An additional 17 percent plan to increase cloud spend 50 to 100 percent. Overall, 71 percent of enterprises will grow public cloud spend more than 20 percent.

Optimizing cloud costs is top initiative: Optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative again for the second year in a row for all cloud users (58 percent), which is an increase over 2017 (53 percent). The second priority is moving more workloads to the cloud (51%).

Cloud users leverage multiple clouds: Respondents are already running applications in 3.1 clouds and experimenting with 1.7 more for a total of 4.8 clouds used.

Enterprises create cloud “centers of excellence” to focus on cloud governance: 57 percent of enterprises already have a central cloud team or center of excellence with another 24 percent planning one. These central teams are focusing on planning which applications to move to cloud (69 percent), optimizing costs (64 percent), and setting cloud policies (60 percent).

Cloud architects are on the rise: We see a continued increase in cloud architects (and a slight decline in the number of IT architects). In 2018, 61 percent of architects say they are cloud architects, an increase from 56 percent in 2017. The percentage of architects identifying as IT architects has decreased to 31 percent in 2018 from 35 percent in 2017.

Top cloud challenges in 2018 are security and spend: Security is a challenge for 77 percent of respondents, with 29 percent seeing it as a significant challenge. Managing cloud spend is a challenge for 76 percent of respondents, while a smaller 21 percent see it as a significant challenge. Security is the largest issue among cloud beginners, while cost becomes a bigger challenge for intermediate and advanced users.

Public cloud adoption is up: Adoption of public cloud grew for all cloud providers. Across all users, AWS increased adoption from 57 percent in 2017 to 64 percent in 2018; Azure increased from 34 to 45 percent; Google Cloud increased from 15 to 18 percent; IBM Cloud increased from 8 to 10 percent; VMware Cloud on AWS came right out of the gate strongly with 8 percent adoption; Oracle Cloud increased from 3 to 6 percent; and Alibaba Cloud showed 2 percent adoption in its first year being included in the survey.

Azure closes ground on AWS, especially in the enterprise: Among enterprises, Azure grew enterprise adoption strongly to 58 percent, gaining ground on AWS at 68 percent. Among enterprises just beginning their cloud journey, Azure is used by 49 percent while AWS is at 47 percent. Azure also saw strong growth in the footprint of virtual machines used by its customers: 44 percent of Azure users have more than 50 VMs (up from 32 percent in 2017), while 59 percent of AWS users have more than 50 VMs (up from 51 percent in 2017).

Extended public cloud services grow (IoT, machine learning, container-as-a-service, and more): We look at the percentages of companies using extended cloud services such as relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) (44 percent), container-as-a-service (19 percent), NoSQL DBaaS (28 percent), machine learning (12 percent), IoT Services (6 percent), and many more. The fastest-growing cloud services year over year are serverless (up 75 percent), container-as-a-service (up 36 percent), and SQL DBaaS (up 26 percent).

Private cloud adoption grows across the board: Overall, VMware vSphere continues to lead with 50 percent adoption, up significantly from last year (42 percent). OpenStack (24 percent), VMware vCloud Director (24 percent), Microsoft System Center (23 percent), and bare metal (22 percent) were all neck and neck.

Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud container services all grow: Overall Docker adoption increased to 49 percent from 35 percent last year (a growth rate of 40 percent). Kubernetes grew even faster, almost doubling to reach 27 percent adoption. AWS’ container service reached 44 percent adoption (a growth rate of 26 percent from 2017), while Azure’s reached 20 percent and Google’s reached 14 percent.

Survey Methodology: RightScale conducted its annual State of the Cloud Survey in January 2018. The survey questioned technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. The 997 respondents range from technical executives to managers and practitioners and represent organizations of varying sizes across many industries. Their answers provide a comprehensive perspective on the state of the cloud today. The margin of error is 3.08 percent.

Share this

The Latest

June 01, 2023

The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...

May 31, 2023

Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...

May 30, 2023

Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...

May 25, 2023

Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...

May 24, 2023

As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...

May 23, 2023

Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...

May 22, 2023

Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...

May 18, 2023

Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...

May 17, 2023

When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...

May 16, 2023

Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...