HITS

Teradici Report: Companies Overwhelmingly See Importance of Hybrid, Multicloud Strategies

IT professionals at companies across multiple vertical industries now overwhelmingly understand the increasing importance of a hybrid or multicloud strategy — whether they’ve implemented such a plan themselves or not, according to the findings of a new Teradici study.

That was one of “several clear themes” that emerged from its survey of 489 IT professionals in April, Teradici said in “The State of Multicloud: Virtual Desktop Deployments in 2019,” released June 26.

“Not surprisingly, cost is the top reason for influencing the selection of a particular cloud,” Teradici said in the report, noting more than 70% of respondents cited that issue. Cost was also the No. 1 reason why organizations without a multicloud deployment strategy were hesitant to move to a hybrid or multicloud environment, the company said. Other chief reasons cited were complexity and staff resources, followed by security and regulatory concerns, although those have dropped significantly in recent years and were cited by under 10% of respondents, Teradici said.

When asked what factors prevented organizations from accomplishing hybrid or multicloud solutions, 71% said training was lacking, while 47% cited training in general and 24% cited specific cloud training (AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, as examples). That indicated many cloud IT professionals were “proficient in a single cloud but not necessarily in multiple cloud provider environments,” according to Teradici.

Corporate buy-in was a concern that arose from “other” field responses with some particular commercial cloud providers, the company said. Other factors respondents mentioned included lack of guidance, small teams not having the resources to implement large-scale change, a lack of understanding about where to start and complex pricing.

Other clear themes that emerged from the survey results included: Ease of management is the most important factor in choosing a virtualization solution, with more than double the percentage of respondents feeling that way, compared to the next two factors, user experience and performance; disaster recovery was cited as a top factor with 65% of respondents saying that’s extremely important or very important for a multicloud virtualization deployment to help with a disaster recovery strategy; and top reasons for moving workloads from one cloud to another include cost savings, disaster recovery, location of data center and availability of virtual machines and graphic processing units (GPUs).

Almost half of the respondents (46%) said they now operate in a single cloud or none at all. The other 54% said they operate in a multicloud environment, usually with two clouds. Nine percent of those using a multicloud strategy said they were currently using a mix of five or more cloud services where they’ve moved workloads or applications across a mix of public cloud or on-premises environments, Teradici said.

In comparison, a recent Gartner survey that polled only public cloud users found that 81% of its respondents were working with two or more providers, Teradici noted.

Companies taking full advantage of the cloud’s benefits and that have implemented a hybrid or multicloud strategy were mostly driven by two main factors: Cost and performance, according to Teradici. After cost savings (33%), the results showed 24% of respondents said avoiding vendor lock-in was a major reason for considering their hybrid or multicloud strategy, it said.

Having the flexibility to move workloads from one cloud provider to another allows companies to “realize price elasticity by not relying on a single public cloud provider for fees and terms,” the report said.

Twenty-seven percent of respondents said uptime benefits were a big reason to move to a hybrid or multicloud strategy, and that was also a big focus for the top cloud providers to ensure there was limited downtown as companies need to have ongoing access to their systems at all times without interruption, according to Teradici.

For many years, desktop computers were literally on top of desks, and that made procurement, deployment and maintenance time-consuming and expensive, the company noted. However, with the growing number of services and options, more organizations than ever are turning to virtualization in the cloud to alleviate the burden of managing desktops. By far, the costly maintenance of desktops was cited as the most common challenge faced by respondents.

Although 54% of respondents who implemented a multicloud or hybrid cloud solution viewed it as very or extremely important, that number grew to 61% when they were asked about the importance as it related to disaster recovery, Teradici noted.

One surprise for Teradici was that 12% of respondents indicated they didn’t have a schedule and only moved workloads when needed, likely to balance loads, onboard new employees or to set up new data centers, it said.

Based on the survey’s results, “we are encouraged to see the growing number of businesses tapping into multicloud or hybrid cloud scenarios to improve business efficiencies, leverage the scale of cloud data centers, enable remote workers, and provision for disaster recovery scenarios,” Ziad Lammam, Teradici VP of product management, told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA).

However, he added: “It is surprising to see the number of companies that are in the midst of their digital transformation, but remain challenged by the lack of resources and multicloud-specific training for their teams. There’s clearly an incredible opportunity for Teradici and our partners to help companies manage their transition to an effective hybrid and multicloud strategy.”
 
The respondents were well distributed across company size, with about 50% of respondents from companies with under 500 employees and the rest split between companies with 501- 1000 employees, 1001-5000 employees and large enterprises with 5000-plus employees. Most of the respondents work in the U.S. and Canada, but all other regions of the globe were represented in the results, Teradici said.

Respondents came from a wide range of verticals, with technology/IT, being the most popular, followed by government/military, media and Entertainment, education, and manufacturing/engineering, it said.

For more details and to see the full results click here.