A global survey, conducted by Dimensional Research, of more than 650 IT decision makers worldwide, uncovered a number of trends in cloud adoption strategies that will be realized in 2015. Participants answered questions on everything from the cloud deployments they are planning to where their cloud infrastructures will reside to how they’ll be interconnected. The results paint a picture of a multi-cloud future that may surprise you.
The multi-cloud rush
The value of deploying multi-cloud services is compelling. Gaining a more flexible, agile and scalable IT infrastructure without vendor lock-in is huge for enterprises trying to compete in today’s digital economy. So it’s no wonder that the vast majority (77%) of IT decision makers say they intend to implement multi-cloud architectures. Ninety-one percent of the survey’s respondents are planning to deploy cloud-based offerings over the next 12 months, with 48% of those decision makers reporting that they will deploy anywhere between 6 – 10+ cloud services during that time period. Among some of the top applications enterprises plan to migrate to multi-clouds are: storage/backup, disaster recovery, business intelligence, project management and content management.
Colocation: the place global multiple clouds gather
Respondents made it very clear that going to a single colocation provider for all their cloud infrastructure and application needs was important. Fifty-eight percent have already entrusted their existing business applications to multi-tenant data centers and 45% intend to entrust their new cloud-based business applications to colocation providers. And underscoring how critical global reach is to colocation, 58% of the respondents planning multi-cloud infrastructures said they will be deploying them in multiple countries.
Interconnection makes multi-cloud work
We’ve always known that direct connections to critical cloud services ensure greater performance and security as compared to the public Internet. Obviously, we’re in good company ̶ 85% of respondents said that direct connections to cloud providers are “highly valued.” They also stated that security was the top attribute associated with direct connections to cloud services, with reliability and performance coming in second and third. Eighty-seven percent of IT decisions makers believe high-performance, multi-cloud interconnection is critical to meet their multi-cloud performance objectives.
This survey bears out the trends we’ve been seeing with enterprise customers in our global IBX data centers for some time. Recognizing a growing demand for multi-cloud interconnection spurred us to develop the Equinix Cloud Exchange, the industry’s first solution for securely accessing multiple global cloud services through a single physical link.
One particularly surprising implication of the survey findings, according to our CTO, Ihab Tarazi was, “…how quickly multicloud strategies are becoming the norm worldwide. Businesses have discovered that colocation can provide many benefits including the ability to connect securely to multiple clouds. In the future, we expect these companies will be able to point to quantifiable ROI as a result of these strategic initiatives.”
Download a full copy of the Dimensional Research report.
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