Enterprise cloud environments become more fragmented

Half of organizations are using more than one cloud, with nearly one in ten using five or more according to new research.

The survey conducted by IOD Cloud Technologies Research in partnership with cloud operations specialist Cloudify shows hybrid cloud is the dominant model.

The most popular two-cloud combination is AWS and Azure, which suggests that organizations are using public/public multi-clouds in order to avoid vendor lock-in. The second most popular two-cloud combination is AWS and OpenStack. Although AWS is more prominent among smaller organizations and OpenStack among larger ones, it’s evident that public and on-premise clouds are living happily side by side across organizations of all sizes.

Fragmentation is also evident in the tools used and in IT culture. Organizations are using a wide range of cloud management tools, with no single vendor dominating the market, and two out of three respondents saying that their organization suffers, or may be suffering, from siloism. 58 percent have separate IT and network departments within their organization for example.

"Organizations are looking to the cloud for performance and innovation, but unfortunately they often find themselves in midst of a highly fragmented cloud world, where technologies are superfluous and incongruous, and where siloism is stifling agility and innovation," says Nati Shalom, CTO of Cloudify. "In this fragmented world, the orchestration layer plays a critical panoramic role, especially in unifying multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, including the seamless integration of legacy software. Orchestration also plays a key role in eliminating silos, freeing organizations to be more agile, disruptive and innovative."

Despite fragmentation, the benefits of cloud remain the same according to the findings. Respondents cite increasing operational efficiency (38 percent), disruption and innovation (28 percent), standardization (13 percent), avoiding vendor lock-in (12 percent) and saving money (nine percent).

You can find out more about the results by registering for a free webinar to be held on September 19th at 1pm EST.

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