Hybrid Cloud Is Rising as Microsoft Azure Challenges Amazon Web Services

Microsoft’s Azure service is inching closer to Amazon’s Web Service as more and more organizations are moving their data to cloud in a bid to streamline operations, according to the annual cloud computing survey from RightScale that highlights the growth of hybrid cloud.
Today, 17% of enterprises have more than 1,000 “virtual machines” (VM) in the public cloud, up from 13% in 2014. Private cloud showed even stronger growth, with 31% of enterprises running more than 1,000 VMs, up from 22% in 2014.
Interestingly, security is no longer the top concern of enterprises moving applications to cloud. Lack of resources and expertise in handling cloud technology is their larger worry.
Amazon is the leader in the market, but Microsoft is coming close behind, says RightScale, which surveyed more than 1,000 IT managers.
Enterprise adoption of Amazon Web Service grew from 50% to 56% while adoption by smaller businesses fell slightly, from 61% to 58%. Azure IaaS grew strongly from 12% to 17% adoption, while Azure PaaS grew from 9% to 13%.
VMware vSphere continues to lead with strong year-over-year growth. Nearly half (44%) of all respondents report that they use it as a private cloud. OpenStack and VMware vCloud Suite both also showed strong growth and remain tied with 19% adoption overall.
According to the report, private cloud adoption increased from 63% to 77%, driving hybrid cloud adoption up from 58% to 71% year-over-year.
“Hybrid adoption is growing with companies using 6 different clouds on average,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “More workloads are moving to public and private clouds. Security concerns have abated. Cloud cost management challenges are increasing.”
Going by the findings, cloud users are running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds. They are experimenting with an additional 1.5 public clouds and 1.3 private clouds.