Veritas Surveys Global Enterprises' Cloud Adoption Status
74% of companies use complex cloud infrastructure.

Veritas Technologies (www.veritas.com/kr) has released its "State of the Hybrid Cloud" report, which examines the current state of cloud adoption among global enterprises. The report highlights that three out of four enterprises today are adopting a hybrid private and public cloud strategy, placing a critical emphasis on corporate information management and security strategies.

Commissioned by Veritas and conducted by Cicero Group, this survey included 1,800 IT decision-makers from companies with 500 or more employees and 75 TB or more of data under management worldwide. The survey found that business-critical workloads in public cloud environments are expected to double over the next 24 months, a growth rate comparable to that of general workloads.

This growth is expected to increase the responsibility of IT departments to ensure high availability and security not only for infrastructure but also for all business services.

This report analyzes the percentage of companies migrating data to the cloud using both private and public cloud services, as well as the factors driving their adoption of hybrid cloud. Our research has revealed that some common myths surrounding cloud migration are untrue.

For example, while it was previously thought that relatively low-criticality workloads would be migrated to the public cloud first, in reality, the percentage of business-critical workloads such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) moving to the cloud is reaching 25-30%, the same as general workloads.

38% of enterprise workloads run in private clouds, 28% in public clouds.

This means businesses are becoming increasingly confident about migrating all types of data to the cloud. Consequently, service providers must more reliably ensure high availability and prevent downtime, and IT departments must also develop appropriate data protection strategies that encompass heterogeneous on- and off-premises infrastructure.

38% of enterprise workloads run in private clouds, while 28% run in public clouds. These figures are expected to grow by 7% and 18%, respectively, over the next 12 months. Seventy-four percent of enterprises use two or more cloud infrastructure vendors to meet their workload requirements, and 23% use four or more cloud infrastructure vendors. Protecting, managing, and leveraging data across these heterogeneous environments will largely fall on the shoulders of IT departments.

Looking at the percentage of workloads migrating to the public cloud by region, Japan and Brazil are actively using the public cloud, migrating about 50% more workloads to the public cloud than the United States, Canada, France, and Germany.

By industry, manufacturing leads the way in public cloud migration, running more than 30% of workloads on the public cloud, followed by telecommunications at 24%, healthcare and finance at 23%, and the public sector at 16%.

One in three respondents cited "cost" as the primary reason for migrating to the public cloud. Furthermore, "security and protection architecture" was cited as the top reason for not choosing the public cloud by 50%, revealing that "security" remains the biggest obstacle to public cloud adoption. Interestingly, however, companies that have adopted the public cloud cited "security" as the number one reason for their satisfaction with their decision. Considering this, public cloud vendors need to further emphasize their security capabilities and success stories.

A significant number of respondents predicted that certain workloads would remain on-premises rather than migrate to the cloud. Twenty-eight percent said they would continue to run backup and recovery on-premises. Twenty-seven percent said they would not migrate disaster recovery to the cloud, and 26% said they would keep archives, data warehousing, and relational/OLTP databases on-premises.

81% of companies rely on service providers for support in cloud implementation and ongoing operations. For IT departments, complex hybrid cloud environments are a constant challenge, and the role of service providers with superior support and technical expertise in migrating workloads to the public cloud will become increasingly important.

“While trust in migrating data to cloud environments is growing, this places another burden on service providers to ensure high availability and prevent unexpected downtime,” said Wonyoung Cho, CEO of Veritas Korea. “This change presents new challenges for corporate IT departments to consider when establishing data protection strategies that are appropriate for both on-premises and off-premises infrastructure to ensure reliable data management.”

More details from Veritas' "State of the Hybrid Cloud" report can be downloaded here, along with four information management strategies for enterprises to maximize agility and minimize risk in hybrid cloud environments.