Companies larger than 1,000 employees appear to be a bit further ahead of smaller companies when it comes to adopting cloud computing. Of those larger companies, 77 percent have adopted clouds in some way, compared with 73 percent for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, according to a recent survey of 625 business, development and IT staffers from cloud-management provider RightScale.
The interesting area is the rise in the provisioning of resources on multiple clouds, which includes private-public combinations as well as multiple public clouds. Of the more than three quarters of larger companies that are adopting clouds, 77 percent of those are deploying across multiple clouds. Last year’s survey, which did not break out companies by size, found that 68 percent had deployments spanning more than one cloud.
It’s great news for RightScale, which helps Zynga and other companies keep track of all their clouds from a single pane of glass. It also bodes well for competitors, such as Enstratius (formerly named enStratus) and Server Density.
Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, speaks at the RightScale Compute conference in San Francisco on April 26
At a meeting with reporters and representatives of RightScale customers, RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said that although he doesn’t have survey data to back up the assertion, he believes the use of multiple clouds has been steadily rising. “I think it (multi-cloud use) was lower (before the first survey),” Crandell said. “That’s my gut instinct.” Whether it’s to save money, to have different applications running on different hardware or to focus on core competencies, companies have a variety of motivations to try running their operations on clouds.
Still, compliance with regulations and concerns about security keep some companies from trying out the public clouds or, in some cases, even private clouds. Crandell said it can come down to legal issues. Businesses might not want to risk putting their own customers at risk of data breaches. “It’s their attorneys who are dealing with that as well as ours,” Crandell said, describing the thinking of some businesses.
Even with those conditions, it does seem that cloud and multi-cloud adoption will keep going up, and that means full speed ahead for management companies such as RightScale.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Rechitan Sorin.
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