Denodo: Global Cloud Survey 2020

Over the past year, we see a positive reinforcement of cloud adoption with at least a 10% increase across watchers, beginners, and intermediate adopters.

Respondents have realized that adopting cloud technology is not as simple as flipping a switch, and more careful analysis and evaluation might be needed to get started. One has to consider various choices along the lines of the costs and benefits of each cloud platform, as well as the willingness of stakeholders to equally participate in and support the organization’s cloud journey.

Cloud platforms each have their own advantages, and the right cloud deployment strategy can meld those separate benefits into a unified platform. Putting your data and apps into the right cloud configuration will make the difference, not only in terms of system responsiveness but also ROI.

A number of challenges prevent enterprises from fully embracing cloud technology. From concerns about security, control, and performance, to frustrations surrounding the management of multiple clouds and getting locked into using a specific vendor, there is no shortage of reasons why enterprises should think carefully, and due diligence is always a good step.

With data spread across disparate sources and geographic regions, it is even more important to ensure that data movement and replication is minimized, to save time and cost.

There are several data formats to choose from when working with applications in the cloud. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the trade-offs will help you choose a format that fits your goals.

While two thirds of the data being put to use is still in a structured format (68%), there is a vast pool of unstructured data that is not yet exercised completely. Cloud object storage (47%) along with SaaS data (44%) are frequently used to maximize ease of computation and performance optimization.

As seen across numerous surveys, organizations still have concerns about cloud computing. While IT leaders are embracing the cloud because of its benefits, they continue to face significant cloud computing challenges, with security and governance again topping the list. This appears to be waning as time passes, particularly among companies that have been using the cloud longer.

Cloud specific skills (50%) and data integration (43%) are close behind security (65%) as the top 3 challenges to be dealt with when it comes to planning and adopting a cloud platform.

Hybrid cloud configurations are at the center of all cloud deployments, closely followed by public and private clouds. Multi-cloud architecture is certainly being talked about a lot, but it needs to be closely evaluated based on a variety of factors, such as initial and ongoing costs, SLA/provider skills, regional deployment capabilities, and configuration flexibility.

The above numbers are in line with the top three deployment strategies from 2019, which consist of hybrid, public, and private clouds. That does not mean that multi-cloud architecture is not important, as users are blending their workloads to take advantage of capabilities across different cloud providers.

Additionally, security and governance play important roles in how data flows across applications in the cloud, and the proper choice of a data management tool in the cloud becomes even more crucial to success.

The top cloud providers for 2020 have grown considerably. As a result, Microsoft Azure has emerged as the new leader (67%), although AWS (61%) is not far behind. One could say that they are closely competing, and one might choose one or the other, depending on the specific services that one needs. Azure cloud has penetrated various markets, and at the same time, other cloud providers such as Google, IBM, and Oracle, are taking note.

Google, IBM, and Oracle have quite a bit of catching up to do. While Alibaba might be the platform of choice in the APAC region, it does not have enough votes to bring it into the spotlight.

The interoperability of Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure enables both, working in tandem, to support both line-of-business and mission-critical applications. Customers can now migrate to the cloud or build new applications, leveraging the best of Oracle Cloud, including Oracle Autonomous Database, and the best of Microsoft Azure, with seamless interoperability.

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications, and related business components to the cloud. However, migration can be disruptive, depending on the type of strategy employed. Data integration plays an important role during cloud migration and should not be sidelined. The general goal or benefit of any cloud migration is to host applications and data in the most effective IT environment possible, based on factors such as cost, performance, and security.

If you follow the hype, you might think that every enterprise has migrated their applications to the cloud and that your organization is behind the times with its on-premises or co-located data center. The truth is, many cloud computing technologies are a few years’ away from mainstream adoption. Companies consider it daunting to move the majority of their workloads to the cloud, not only because of the migration cost, but also because their IT teams might not be ready to operate in this new world. With the new advancements around Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, serverless, and containers, concerns over security and compliance can place IT operations teams in a state of flux for years, which threatens uptime and reliability. Of course, migration itself can also be a source for downtime.

Migrating to a new cloud infrastructure can be both thrilling and challenging. The actual process of migrating to the cloud can be cumbersome and difficult to handle, though it does not always have to be this way. Organizations simply need to plan appropriately for the move and carefully select the best approach. The most common ones are re-architecting, rehosting, and re-platforming.

As you can see from the diagram above, one third (35%) of the respondents are looking at re-architecting their applications, which involves the modernization of the entire data infrastructure. As you can see, 21% selected rehosting, possibly due to SMBs trying to accelerate the migration in a simplified manner, whereas 18% of the respondents are re-platforming, to take advantage of new compute and storage capabilities without making any major changes to the application.

While building a scalable system is a lot easier with the advent of cloud technologies, identifying the right fit can be challenging. This might take years of solid experience in an architectural space. Cloud services offer a wide range of capabilities that facilitate use cases in the cloud, and the overall architecture plays an important role, which is directly tied to geographical location, security, network infrastructure, and storage, some of the drivers that might define the SLAs and interoperability. Advanced use cases around API-driven services and IoT data management exploit multi-location architecture, which is also influenced by security and governance.

DevOps is a cultural practice of bringing together development and the operations verticals so that both teams can work collaboratively instead of in siloes. Containerization is a DevOps-friendly approach to production because it enables reproducibility and the ability to automate deployments. All organizations should enhance and integrate their security processes for hassle-free development and the seamless delivery of applications and services.

Customers can benefit from using containers in the cloud, as this can help with portability and scaling, simplifying the overall deployment process, and enhancing automation and simplicity.

As you can see in the diagram above, there are large differences in container adoption and popularity. More than two thirds of the respondents are leveraging some type of container implementation, with Docker leading the way, and close to 50% are taking advantage of it. Kubernetes is gaining steam, as is evident from the consistent support of all the key cloud providers.

As evidence that cloud adoption is accelerating, container use is growing by 50% year-over-year, thus becoming an important element of modern architecture.

As data’s center of gravity shifts to the cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures become the basis of data management and data flow. We saw earlier that various types of data (structured and unstructured) play a role in terms of integration and generation of advanced insights and thus data must be easily available in the cloud to boost agility and the ability to innovate, but easy accessibility must be balanced with protection to ensure maximum business value. The survey takes into account these two main considerations when evaluating a cloud solution.

More than 60% of the respondents are concerned about the cost implication of software in the cloud, and this ties directly to license management capabilities and clarity. Another 30-40% of the respondents are not sure if they can easily validate the value of the cloud solution via a POC nor easily understand the impact of the workload scaling on license costs. One fourth of the respondents would prefer managed services (SaaS) for less dependency on IT or cloud-specific skills.

Hybrid and multi-cloud architecture accounts for more than 50% of the surveyed group’s deployment considerations and is the most popular form of deployment, while private cloud architecture is not going away anytime soon. Support for technologies such as AWS outposts, Azure Arc, and Google is the same as that for the previous year.

Cloud maturity is on the rise with 10% more users embarking on the cloud journey than last year. In addition, 78% of those surveyed are processing some meaningful cloud workloads, adding to the credibility of cloud adoption.

Once again, security- and governance-related challenges top the list, indicated by close to 70% of the respondents, while concerns around multi-cloud skills follow closely behind, emerging as the second biggest challenge. 

For the first time in three years, since the Denodo Global Cloud Survey was first introduced, Microsoft
Azure is the top public cloud choice, and together with AWS, it now accounts for more than two-thirds of the market share.

Cloud marketplaces are becoming more popular not only because of utility pricing and self-serviceable options but also because of the variety of procurement and transaction options, such as private offers and enterprise contracts.

DevOps and containerization have become key components of cloud architecture and planning, due to organizations’ growing needs for automation and cost simplification using Kubernetes and other tools.

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