Orgs don’t just want to stick to one cloud, Forrester research shows

Public cloud services lead the pack in terms of adoption, but internal and privately hosted clouds aren’t far behind, according to a recent analysis by Forrester.

Of over 2,000 enterprise cloud decision-makers who responded to Forrester’s 2023 survey on cloud infrastructure, 94% said they had adopted or planned to adopt public cloud infrastructure. However, 93% and 90% said the same of internal private and hosted private clouds respectively.

In a separate poll, security, storage, logging/monitoring, and networking were the top technologies that respondents said they had already adopted or planned to adopt in a cloud-native version (>90% in each category). However, the vast majority also said they had switched or planned to switch to cloud-native containers and Kubernetes applications.

Lee Sustar, a principal analyst at Forrester, told IT Brew the results show cloud is now the standard in the enterprise world, even for organizations which utilize on-prem heavily.

“Everybody’s got something going in the cloud,” Sustar said. “Even for organizations that have plenty of data centers, maybe mainframes, or other kinds of legacy infrastructure around, cloud has become the default setting.”

Around eight in ten respondents said they had adopted or planned to adopt Kubernetes either in public or private clouds or on the edge, according to the report.

“It’s a relatively new technology in terms of being mature,” Sustar said. “For the enterprise, those are big numbers.”

Forrester also reported that in a poll of over 1,300 enterprise cloud managers with seniority of director or above, 77% said they expected their budgets for internal private cloud to rise year over year in 2024. Three out of four said the same of public cloud. Among the respondents who expected their public cloud budgets to increase, 65% said the extra spend would likely result in increasing their number of providers (ie, going or expanding multi-cloud).

Top reasons to increase public cloud investment, according to Forrester, included compliance/regulations (43%), resilience (40%), and flexibility (39%). According to Sustar, heavily regulated industries like banking and large government organizations are using multi-cloud to mitigate risks of vendor concentration.

Finally, the Forrester research also showed 56% of respondents are satisfied with their primary public cloud provider, while another 31% was evaluating or planning to stay with different products from the same vendor. Just 12% said they intended to switch to a new provider.

Low rates of switching vendors may have to do with cloud stickiness, or the way in which the hassle of migrating solutions can outweigh the benefits. CIO Dive noted those factors can include egress fees, app restructuring, and workforce retraining. Other contributors to stickiness might include provider practices that lock in customers to all-in-one solutions, or the shortage of cloud engineering talent, which makes it more difficult to acquire expertise for specific platforms.

Sustar said the numbers might reflect the reality that cloud providers tend to be much more massive than their customers.

“You get a lot of scale and capabilities that you couldn’t get with the same amount of money on your own data center, so that’s very attractive,” Sustar said. “But at the same time, there’s a question like, ‘Are they so big that if we need help, they’re going to be there?’”

“Fifty-six percent may strike some as little, but I think that is a reflection of that kind of flux,” he added.