North American enterprises go all-in on hyperscalers, survey reveals
A total of 59 percent of North American enterprises sourced their cloud services from hyperscalers in 2019, a sum that will rise to 65 percent in 2021, according to survey results from IHS Markit | Technology, now a part of Informa Tech.
The survey revealed that enterprises are relying more on hyperscalers for cloud services than on smaller second-tier players. Respondents also noted that public clouds are used extensively by enterprises today, while multi-cloud adoption is expected to see the most growth in the future.
“The large portion of survey respondents using hyperscalers like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure for cloud services shouldn’t come as a surprise,” said Devan Adams, principal analyst at IHS Markit | Technology. “That’s because these organizations are usually better equipped to offer customers a wide variety of services, all with the backing of extensive service level agreements (SLAs).”
Devan Adams, Principle Analyst, IHS Market
Multi-cloud use is accelerating
As part of its questionnaire, the IHS Markit | Technology Cloud Service Strategies & Leadership North American Enterprise Survey asked respondents which types of cloud service architectures they are currently using and what they plan to use by July 2021.
The survey results revealed:
Off-premises private clouds will see an increase in adoption, with 37 percent of respondents expecting to use them in 2021, up from 28 percent in 2019. On-premises private cloud adoption is set to rise to 54 percent of respondents, up from 48 percent during the same time period.
Off-premises hybrid cloud utilization will expand as well, with 36 percent of respondents indicating they will use such an approach in 2021, up from 25 percent in 2019. Hybrid cloud adoption will increase to 68 percent, up from 57 percent during the same time period.
Public clouds will have the smallest increase in adoption, with a total of 71 percent in 2021, up from 66 percent in 2019.
“More enterprise users are adopting architectures that allow them to run various services across multiple cloud environments. This approach requires them to find a provider who can deliver a holistic view of all their data and services”. Adams said.
“Cloud service providers (CSPs) are seeing growing demand from enterprises that require a single solution for their on- and off-premises needs,” Adams said. “This is prompting CSPs to add capabilities to their cloud offerings to make them more interoperable with services from other cloud partners and competitors. As a result, more cloud services are being offered by different providers via integrated solutions.”
Multi-clouds and hyperscalers are the ideal combination
“The multi-cloud trend is ramping fast, in line with the move to a distributed architecture consisting of cloud services from various Cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed as one comprehensive offering,” Adams said. “Based on the survey results, we expect enterprises to continue using off-premises cloud services from numerous specialized players to address their specific business needs. And it’s clear that users will look to familiar hyperscale providers as their first choices when migrating their services to the cloud.”
Survey insights
IHS Markit | Technology conducted the survey in August 2019 with 160 North American Enterprises that have at least 101 employees and subscribe to off-premises cloud services.
Qualified respondents had detailed knowledge and purchase-decision influence regarding their organizations’ cloud service plans. As a result, 99 percent of survey respondents were either the primary decision maker or had significant influence.
In terms of business size, 50 percent of the respondents were from medium-sized organizations, with 101 to 1,000 employees, while the rest were from large organizations with staff sizes larger than 1,000.
(For more information, including the full report, visit: https://technology.ihs.com)