Need for data portability is driving cloud strategies

The rise in container use and demands for data portability are driving decisions on cloud adoption according to a new report.

Workload automation specialist Turbonomic surveyed over 800 IT professionals to examines the underlying dynamics fueling cloud-native/container and multicloud adoption.

Among the findings are that 83 percent of respondents expect workloads to move freely across clouds. The primary drivers for workload portability and true multicloud elasticity are a desire to have best-of-breed cloud services and guarantee application availability.

The majority of respondents (62 percent) have already embarked on their cloud native/container journey -- with adoption accelerating. On average, respondents estimate that 26 percent of environments currently use containerized applications -- which respondents expect to nearly double by 2021. The data also reveals that IT organizations are beginning to place a higher degree of trust in containers, with respondents categorizing nearly a third of containerized applications as mission-critical.

There are some things that are seen as barriers to portability, however. Among these are ensuring security (25 percent), the ability for applications and data to be fully portable (23 percent), and the ability to manage compliance across multiple platforms (14 percent).

"The move toward hybrid and multicloud is well underway. This move is driven by an acute need for IT modernization, as IT continues to elevate its value by increasingly driving innovation and new revenue opportunities," says Tom Murphy, CMO at Turbonomic. "Containers and cloud native are central to IT modernization initiatives, creating a tipping point in complexity. Across industries, IT staff are seeking to minimize human-assisted automation, which is why they are increasingly turning toward workload automation."

Among other findings are that only 18 percent of IT organizations have adopted serverless computing, and indicate they are more than a year away from broad adoption, with 40 percent planning to move forward in the next 18 months.

You can get the full report from the Turbonomic website.

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