On Private Cloud Popularity, High-Profile New Surveys Raise Questions

If you look at the results of some high-profile new surveys on cloud computing, they reveal that some seismic shifts are taking place. At the same time, some results from recent surveys conflict with each other.

Canonical came out with findings from its sixth annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey recently, which went out to respondents at the end of 2014. We covered it here.  Among other things, it showed that "cloud adoption remains heavily weighted to private clouds," which account for 35 percent of adoptions, Canonical said.  On the other hand, RightScale's 2015 State of the Cloud report, always one of the more definitive barometers for the state of cloud computing, found that private cloud popularity is waning, and hybrid clouds are all the rage.

Part of the issue with the difference in findings across the two surveys is that Canonical's 3,000 respondents "were mostly Ubuntu server and cloud users," according to the company. Meanwhile, RightScale's  930 respondents were professionals with technical roles across a broad cross-section of organizations.

RightScale's survey reported the following:

 Private clouds stalled in 2015 with only small changes in adoption: Respondents reported minimal changes in adoption of private cloud technologies from 2014. VMware vSphere continues to lead with 53 percent of enterprise respondents reporting that they use it as a private cloud. Enterprises using OpenStack shows the largest increase for 2015, growing by 3 percent. The new Azure Pack offering shows strong use in its first year, used by 11 percent of enterprises.

Where did the two surveys agree? They both determined that cloud computing has huge momentum in enterprises.

According to Canonical:

 "This year, the pattern is continuing and cloud adoption remains heavily weighted to private clouds (35%). The most popular platform for private cloud is OpenStack, used by 53% of those respondents who have deployed a private cloud infrastructure. Interestingly, hybrid clouds are on the rise at 20%, up from 15% last year. Today, hybrid cloud is almost as popular as public cloud (used by 23%) a clear shift from last year, when public cloud was at 27%. It’s interesting that recent price cuts by major public cloud providers don’t seem to have had a major impact on public cloud adoption, which could imply that the drivers behind the choice of infrastructure are more than economic."

 RightScale's survey also found that cloud decision-making patterns are changing. "The tide of enterprise cloud adoption has shifted from shadow IT to strategic adoption led by central IT teams," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "As enterprise IT has become more open to public cloud and more comfortable with cloud security, it is now in a strong position to broker cloud services to internal customers and drive cloud adoption forward. In the next year organizations expect to shift more workloads to cloud, with public cloud workloads growing faster than private cloud."

 The full results of the RightScale survey are available at www.rightscale.com/2015-cloud-report.

 If you want to dig into the findings from the Canonical survey, there is a SlideShare here, and there is a detailed infographic at the bottom of the page here.