Findings Show Cloud Skills Shortages, Security, and Overspending are Challenging Organizations
HashiCorp, a leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software, released its first State of Cloud Strategy report, which surveyed over 3,000 IT professionals about the state of cloud adoption, challenges and inhibitors, COVID-19’s effect on cloud adoption, and more.
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“The era of multi-cloud is here, driven by digital transformation, cost concerns and organizations wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. Incredibly, more than half of the respondents of our survey have already experienced business value from a multi-cloud strategy,” said Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO, HashiCorp. “However, not all organizations have been able to operationalize multi-cloud, as a result of skills shortages, inconsistent workflows across cloud environments, and teams working in silos.”
State of Cloud Adoption: Most Organizations Have Already Adopted Multi-Cloud
The survey showed that multi-cloud is overwhelmingly the standard operations model for IT organizations of all sizes, in all regions, and every industry, with 76% of survey respondents stating their organization has already adopted a multi-cloud strategy. Survey responses also indicate that this number is expected to increase to 86% in two years. Fifty-three percent of respondents believe that a multi-cloud strategy has helped to achieve the organization’s business goals, with large enterprises currently recognizing the most value from multi-cloud.
Digital transformation (34%) was cited by respondents as the number one most significant driver for multi-cloud adoption, followed by avoiding single vendor lock-in (30%) and cost reductions (28%). Digital transformation ranked highest among large enterprises, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and within the financial services vertical.
Of the big three public clouds, AWS was the leading cloud provider used by respondents (88%). However, respondents expect their use of AWS to remain the same during the next two years. Microsoft Azure ranked second in terms of use or intended use (74%), while Google Cloud was third (64%).
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Cloud Spending — and Overspending
Cloud budgets vary by organization size, vertical, and geographic region. Forty percent of respondents’ organizations have an annual cloud spend of $100,000 to $2 million, while 27% of organizations spend less than $100,000 annually. Eighteen percent of organizations spend between $2 million and $10 million, and 15% spend more than $10 million annually.
Thirty-nine percent of respondents said their organization overspent their planned budgets on cloud, most often because of shifting priorities (29%) or because of unexpected needs related to COVID-19 (21%). Organizations with larger cloud budgets were more likely to have a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), with 66% of organizations with an annual cloud budget of $5 million to $50 million having one, compared to 40% of organizations overall surveyed.
Cloud Program Challenges and Inhibitors: Concerns about Costs and Skills
While the survey shows that the cloud — and multi-cloud in particular — is critical to meeting business goals, it also revealed several areas of concern for organizations.
Cloud inhibitors and challenges varied across regions, industry, and company size, as well as by component of the technology stack. Respondents stated the top inhibitors to multi-cloud programs are cost concerns (51%), security concerns (47%), and lack of in-house skills (41%). Similarly, organizations are struggling to operationalize multi-cloud. Top reasons include skills shortages (57%), budget constraints that affect headcount (27%), inconsistent workflows across cloud environments (33%), organizations and teams working in silos, and poor collaboration or processes that are too complex (29%).
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Security: A Driver and Inhibitor for Cloud Adoption
Survey results showed that cloud security was both a driver and an inhibitor for multi-cloud adoption. Respondents agreed that the top cloud security concerns were data and privacy protection (40%), data theft (33%), and regulatory compliance (31%).
Staffing and skill shortages (26%) topped the list when respondents were asked about the most significant cloud security challenges. That was followed by insufficient tooling and no real-time visibility and insight (12% each).
Cloud Is Not Just a Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
There were some surprising results related to the effects of COVID-19 on organizations’ cloud adoption. Forty-six percent of respondents stated that the COVID-19 pandemic had not accelerated cloud adoption, while 54% of respondents stated that COVID-19 had some effect on their cloud adoption timelines. Nineteen percent said it had a low impact, accelerating efforts by six to 12 months, and 26% said it had a moderate impact, accelerating efforts by one to two years. Nine percent of organizations said the pandemic had accelerated their efforts by more than two years.
The top infrastructure initiatives that were accelerated as a result of COVID-19 were infrastructure as code (49%), container orchestration (41%), compliance and governance, and network infrastructure automation (33% each). However, it was notable that COVID-19 increased the use of open source software for 39% of respondents.
Methodology
The 2021 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey was conducted in February 2021. HashiCorp reached out to approximately 300,000 people for whom we had opt-in email addresses. To encourage responses, we offered an incentive drawing. We received 3,205 responses from around the world, though not all respondents answered all 34 questions. Responses by location were North America (39%); Europe, Middle East, and Africa (34%); Asia-Pacific (20%); Latin America (6%), no response (1%)
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