Virtana Research Finds More Than 80% of Enterprises Have a Multi-Cloud Strategy and 78% Are Using More Than Three Public Clouds

Virtana, a leading provider of AI-driven solutions for hybrid cloud management and monitoring, released its latest independent research report, The State of Multi-Cloud Management 2022. The report, based on a survey of 360 CIOs and IT leaders in the US and the UK—all of whom are cloud decision-makers—reveals that enterprises plan to grow their multi-cloud environments in 2022; 82% of organizations are currently leveraging a multi-cloud strategy and 78% of organizations have workloads deployed in more than three public clouds.

Given the pandemic-induced wave of remote work, it was not surprising to see that the number of respondent organizations with over half of their workloads in the public cloud grew 75% in the last 13 months. And that 51% plan to increase their number of public cloud instances by the end of 2022.

Tim Grieser, Research VP, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC commented: “In the current era of digital transformation, hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are table stakes. Management of these critical environments is essential in order to have a true strategic business impact and avoid risks that can have real consequences for an organization.”

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Tool sprawl and siloed data impede digital transformation

As organizations continue to move workloads to the cloud, it is increasingly critical to be able to manage it all, including tools, data, controls and evolving capabilities. The report shows that organizations are dealing with:

• Too many tools: 63% of respondents are using five or more separate tools for migration, cloud cost optimization, IPM, APM, and cloud infrastructure monitoring
• Manual processes: 83% are expending some level of manual effort to consolidate data from all of these tools, while 53% of organizations using 20+ tools still have manual processes

Without consolidated data, organizations are unable to get a comprehensive and complete view of their infrastructure, and 73% state that siloed efforts are limiting their ability to realize the full potential of the cloud.

Cloud deployment may be widespread; formal controls are not

The report also found that the majority of organizations do not have solid cost and governance controls in place, which are of strategic importance to digital transformation and competitiveness. While the vast majority agree there is value in both financial operations (FinOps) (87%) and cloud governance (96%), 70% of respondents have not yet developed a mature FinOps practice and 75% are lacking cloud governance to guide cloud management.

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“After rushing to the public cloud in early 2020, organizations spent last year feeling the business impacts from suboptimal hybrid cloud implementations that ranged from skyrocketing costs and performance problems to management headaches,” said Jonathan Cyr, VP of Product Management for Virtana.

The complexities of hybrid and multi-cloud environments are forcing organizations to look for new ways to improve their management capabilities. Two approaches – workload portability and serverless computing – have gained traction. 96% of organizations see the value in workload portability, but for many (71%), it is not yet an operational reality. Still, over half (58%) of organizations believe workload portability will lead to maximized cost savings.

When it comes to serverless computing – a cloud computing model where cloud service providers (CSPs) manage the servers on behalf of their customers – 95% of respondents see the value in the effort, but only 76% are in the early stages of implementing a serverless strategy. To that end, more than half cite increased scalability (55%) and reduced cost (54%) as top benefits for doing so.

Cyr continued: “This year, organizations are reimagining hybrid cloud strategies and processes and are realizing that in order to maximize the benefits of the cloud they must first understand that unified visibility and simplified management are critical to controlling cost and risk – paving the way for true business transformation.”

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