Techaisle Blog

Today, at Cloud Next 2019 in San Francisco, Google’s annual industry conference, Google announced its Cloud Services Platform, Anthos, for managing hybrid clouds that span on-premise and cloud data centers, and across multi-cloud environments. It is a big deal. It uses Kubernetes to enable migration across environments, is hardware agnostic, supports Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, and is subscription-based with a starting list price of $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block.

There is a thought that Anthos is a shot across the bows of AWS and Azure – and certainly, an approach that abstracts functionality from underlying cloud architecture will impinge on the ‘data gravity’ customer retention approach being used by these vendors. But IBM is at risk with Anthos as well, as the positive reception of its recent Red Hat acquisition is rooted in the promise of a single-vendor approach to providing hybrid and multi-cloud management and orchestration capabilities.

Clearly, Anthos has been developed with large enterprises as the target segment; some enterprise accounts are already early beta customers. To ease the addition of cloud as a core infrastructure platform in these accounts (by simplifying migration across in-premise and cloud environments) Google introduced Anthos Migrate, a service which will auto-migrate VMs from on-premise or other clouds into containers in the Google Kubernetes Engine.

It’s important to note, though, that hybrid cloud management is not only a point of pain within enterprise customers – it is a challenge (and arguably, a more acute issue) within midmarket (100-999 employees) firms. Consider these stats from Techaisle study of 510 US midmarket firms:

• 52% of midmarket firms are using multi-cloud
• 45% of midmarket firms have hybrid cloud environments
• 38% of midmarket firms are using multiple public cloud providers for IaaS and PaaS
• 27% of midmarket firms are planning to adopt G-Suite
• 25% of midmarket firms are challenged by how to migrate from one cloud platform to another
• 18% of midmarket cloud workloads are on hybrid clouds

Data for Europe and Asia/Pacific also very interesting current and planned adoption percentages for hybrid/multi-cloud.

The multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud journey began within midmarket firms much before it became fashionable within enterprises.

The rigor in data collection, the depth in data analysis and the accuracy in forward looking insights that Techaisle brings in its small business & midmarket research has extended to enterprise. Techaisle’s US Enterprise Cloud Adoption Trends provides an in-depth and definitive look into the state of cloud adoption within large businesses.

1. Only 18% of US enterprises have mature cloud adoption and are optimizing usages; 36% have a cautious approach to cloud. Smaller size large enterprises have reached maturity stage whereas larger sized enterprises have ad hoc approach to cloud
2. In 92% of US enterprises, IT has a voice on the Board and helps drive the direction of the business rather than business deciding IT needs
3. Top IT challenge is implementing new strategic IT applications to improve organization’s competitiveness; 74% believe that investments in cloud increases their competitiveness
4. Greatest benefit of cloud is the ability to launch new products and services
5. 61% want seamless integration with on-premise systems
6. For 65% of US enterprises, security and regulatory compliance is the biggest challenge in developing strategies for cloud adoption
7. In 60% of enterprises data sovereignty and privacy are preventing acceleration of cloud
8. 75% of US enterprises have adopted Hybrid cloud but the largest penetration growth is expected in the use of public cloud
9. 74% are using Amazon AWS but Microsoft Azure is not far behind at 65%
10. 20% of US enterprises use all three types of cloud deployment – private, public and hybrid but the future looks very different

The research deliverable covers several topics including:

• Top 10 Enterprise IT challenges & business issues
• Enterprise Cloud adoption maturity – ad hoc to mature
• Greatest benefits of using Cloud
• Factors driving cloud adoption strategy
• Key attributes of a good cloud solution
• Challenges in developing strategies for cloud adoption
• Factors preventing Enterprises from accelerating cloud adoption
• Current & Planned adoption of services, type of deployment & workloads
• Current & planned cloud applications
• Enterprise cloud best practices - hybrid cloud, hybrid IT
• Enterprise cloud security best practices
• Use of public cloud within enterprises
• Benefits of Public Cloud adoption
• Top drivers of Public Cloud adoption
• Key challenges in implementing public cloud
• Workloads being transferred to Public Cloud
• Key Industry segments using Public Cloud services to derive its benefits
• Types and brands of public Cloud platform being used - Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM SoftLayer
• Comparative analysis of AWS, Azure, Google, SoftLayer
• Influencing the Cloud buyer, mapping the buyer’s journey
• Influencing the C-Suite

The Techaisle research contains a wealth of data that marketers can use to understand cloud adoption within the US enterprises and build IT buyer-centric marketing initiatives.