A pre-pandemic survey carried out by O’Reilly during January 2019 and prior to the pandemic turmoil starting in March and April 2020, indicates that over 88% of organizations currently use some sort of cloud services.
There is an apparent recent trend of organizations moving most of their applications to cloud services. While the most popular cloud option is the public cloud, which has over 61% usage rate, the majority of organizations choose a mix of cloud options, and 49% still run their applications on premises.
The ongoing pandemic is likely to have an impact on these trends identified in the world that include shifting to the cloud and using more microservices. It is possible that as a result of the new reality imposed by the pandemic, the public cloud would become more lucrative for companies of all sizes. Other options may be that the hybrid cloud, a combination between public cloud services and on-premises private cloud infrastructure, will gain more volume, and possibly more multi-cloud usage in order to prevent future disruptions.
Most organizations choose a mixed cloud method
The definition of “cloud” includes a wide range of services, namely SaaS, Paas (such as Microsoft Exchange), and other features used in offices, for example, Google docs, Google sheets, etc.
While public cloud remains the most popular option, traditional on-premises as well as hybrid cloud are still widely used by organizations. Over half of the organizations declared using a mix of cloud services from different providers.
It is noteworthy that the sizes of the organizations also appear to influence the degree of using a cloud. Over 21% of organizations host all of their applications in a cloud.
- Smaller organizations are more prone to hosting most and sometimes all of their applications in the cloud.
- Approximately 17% of companies with 10,000 employees and more host all of their applications in a cloud. For smaller companies between 1 to 100 employees, the percentage is 37%.
- Approximately 39% of organizations choose to host about one-quarter or fewer of their applications in a cloud.
Desired skills for implementing cloud-based infrastructure
65% of users declared that the most sought-after skill area for implementing cloud-based infrastructure was cloud-based security, followed by monitoring (58%), general cloud knowledge (just over 56%), Containers and Kubernetes (just under 56%).
Furthermore, correlations between similar skills were identified, for example, skills that involved security, indicating that this area is considered very important to infrastructure and ops practitioners.
One of the main identified reasons for not using cloud services was keeping data on premises. Other significant reasons, included costs and risks.
Additional conclusions
- The most popular cloud service among users is Amazon Web Services (AWS) (~67%). Other, less popular, but still highly used platforms were found to be Microsoft Azure (~48%), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) (~32%).
- Almost 36% of organizations are currently using AI services, while approximately 47% are expecting to start using AI-based services in upcoming years.
- The volume of site reliability engineering (SRE) is used by 35% of organizations. Nearly 47% of organizations plan to implement SRE in the near future.
The role of CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker)
CASB primarily acts as a mediator between the user (such as a company) and the service in the cloud so as to achieve the ability to monitor user actions and enforce the company’s information security policy. As more and more companies adopt cloud services, we will see growth in implementing the CASB solution.
