Hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and cloud native: The evolving strategies of UK IT leaders

Latest Computing Delta research reveals a wish to keep options open

Hybrid cloud was once assumed to be a stepping stone on the way to a full utility computing future. Indeed, that may ultimately prove to be the case, but if so it's a pretty big stone in a very wide river.

Cloud infrastructure vendors have long stopped talking about hybrid in this way, now boasting instead about how good they are at spanning the cloud - on-prem divide instead.

Which of the following apply to your organisation?

Base: 180 UK IT decision makers

Which is wise of them, because, if the 180 UK IT professionals we surveyed about this are anything to go by, hybrid cloud is very much a part of many organisations' strategies.

Almost 60 per cent said "We have a hybrid cloud strategy, integrating public cloud IaaS/PaaS with on-premises private cloud infrastructure", and nearly a quarter said they have an official multicloud strategy, deliberately choosing multiple cloud vendors to offset lock-in or to take advantage of functions or pricing.

As to what's informing their cloud strategies, first was an increased level of trust in the availability of public cloud services (mentioned by 50%), this despite high-profile outages at some of the big providers recently. Also influential were data protection regulations (42%), and the pandemic (36%) which has been a catalyst for change, and more firms are simply turning to software as a service (34%).

Although just 23 per cent of organisations have a formal multi-cloud strategy, there is a high proportion of ‘accidental multi-clouders', organisations that find themselves using more than one CSP out of circumstance rather than design: 50 per cent of our respondents were using more than one public cloud service with three per cent employing five or more.

The most popular combination by far was the pairing of Azure with AWS. Then it was AWS, Azure plus GCP followed by various combinations thereof.

Why do you use multiple cloud providers?

Why are they choosing to deploy multiple CSPs? The top three reasons are to make use of services that aren't available on their first cloud of choice, to spread risk and avoid lock-in.

"We use AWS for HPC, Azure for the enterprise," commented a senior IT professional in a county council.

"Azure is our primary provider, but we use AWS for development," said a CIO at a university.

Another respondent was using a mix of AWS and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, choosing the latter because it "provides a good, deal combining Oracle licences and hosting in one solution".

And because even the largest cloud firms lack global reach, multinational organisations may require more than one cloud simply to cover the areas they operate in.

See also: Head-to-head: Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud Platform

The big three (+1)

So as we can see, there are many reasons why an organisation might use multiple cloud vendors, and the vendors themselves know this. Gone are the days when AWS would forbid resellers to use the term "multi-cloud".

Gone too are the days when AWS was thought to have an unassailable lead over the competition. According to recent research by Synergy, Amazon holds about a third of the total market, the same proportion as four years ago, while GCP and Azure are rising to meet it, grabbing market share at the expense of smaller players.

So, the hyperscaler IaaS/PaaS market is becoming a battle between three big US players (AWS, Azure, GCP) plus Alibaba in East Asia. Of course, there are many other smaller CSPs too, but economies of scale mean this picture, with three or four dominant companies, is unlikely to change much over the next few years.

Over the next two years do you expect the number of cloud providers you use will change?

Base: 79 UK IT leaders at organisations using more than one CSP

However, it looks as organisations will choose to spread their workloads across more clouds. Twenty-seven per cent of respondents that already use more than one CSP thought the number of IaaS/PaaS providers they use will increase over the next two years, compared with 13 per cent predicting a decrease.

European cloud providers are reporting rising revenues (even as they lose market share), and three-quarters (75%) of our respondents said they would be more likely to consider an EU or UK cloud provider in the future, perhaps in view of Europe's data protection watchdogs' increasing taste for taking the US giants to court over antitrust and data protection issues. But this continent's CSPs will likely be confined mostly to specialist roles.

Going cloud native

Large organisations and government agencies cannot afford to put all their eggs in one cloud basket, indeed regulations may not allow them to. Cloud-agnostic platforms such as Kubernetes are one of the tools available to spread the risk.

Our research found a rise in the use of cloud native technologies compared with August 2020.

Which of the following technologies are you using or planning to use in the near future?

Base: 118 (2020) / 99 (2022) UK IT leaders at organisations that develop software

The key benefits they were hoping to achieve by adopting a cloud native, microservices-based approach were unchanged since 2020. They were, in order, scalability (mentioned by 47%), high availability/resilience (40%), cost savings (33%) and easier automation (27%).

The main challenges were also largely unchanged, although skills shortages were up a couple of notches since August 2020 (48% cf 42%). Making a smooth transition from more traditional technologies and taking business executives and other stakeholders with them were ongoing hurdles for more than a third of respondents who had adopted cloud native.

See also: The big cloud-off: AWS vs Azure