Google is least popular cloud migration platform, finds Druva

Nine in ten firms are planning cloud migration, with AWS far ahead of its competition

90 per cent of companies are aiming to migrate to the cloud by next year, with AWS identified as the most popular platform, according to a survey of the VMWare community by Druva.

Some of the most common reasons provided for moving to the cloud were disaster recovery; automated archiving; and workload mobility. Organisations also view it as a cost-saving and infrastructure-simplifying measure.

AWS was the preferred migration platform of 47 per cent of firms; this should come as no surprise, with Amazon's wide toolset to ease migration (and the recent announcement of two more). Microsoft Azure came next (25 per cent), with VMWare in third, followed by IBM and Google.

Disaster recovery was named by 82 per cent of respondents as a critical reason to ‘go cloud', illustrating the changing perceptions that the IT industry has about the technology. 81 per cent said that they believe disaster recovery for virtual machines is a core need - although long-term loyalty to VMWare's hypervisor platform, which creates and runs VMs, was falling in favour of the cloud. 63 per cent of respondents are considering alternate hypervisors.

54 per cent of organisations said that they wanted a single, central solution that can protect data in a multi- or hybrid cloud environment. This desire for a single solution extended to control systems, with 73 per cent of organisations stating the need for a single control pane, offered as a service.

Dave Packer, VP of product marketing at Druva, said, "The shift toward moving virtual workloads to the cloud is not just about cost; it's an initiative that's seen as critical to IT and business needs. Downtime and poor application performance can be devastating to productivity, and we see an insatiable appetite by business users for a SaaS-based approach to solving seamless connectivity, access, functionality, and cloud integration challenges."

Tying in with the survey results, Druva has just introduced a data management-as-a-service solution called the Druva Cloud Platform, which acts as a unified control plane for data management services across endpoint, server and cloud application data. A technical preview is available now, and the full product will be launched in Q4.