Multicloud is the new reality in enterprise technology according to a study from 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The global study collected information from 1,500 executives and senior decision-makers at enterprises - including 30 from Australia - about how they use the cloud within their organisation and found that almost every cloud journey is now becoming a multicloud journey. Read the full global report here.

In recent years, cloud has become nearly synonymous with IT as enterprises seek increased business agility and improved operational efficiency from the technology they use. While these trends have existed for some time, more than 93 percent of respondents agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a strong driver of greater interest and investment in cloud technology. As organisations faced new challenges such as increased levels of remote work and collaboration with new business partners and suppliers, they adopted a multicloud strategy to gain the flexibility and scalability they needed for this new reality.

“The ‘one-stop-shop’ mentality has died when it comes to the cloud. Instead, multicloud is the reality of enterprise technology environments as these organisations seek to get the right mix of solutions and capabilities they need to operate effectively,” said Melanie Posey, research director, Cloud & Managed Services Transformation at 451 Research. “Multicloud is here to stay, and enterprises are choosing this model for the benefits it provides for a range of different business and operational requirements, like business agility or access to best-of-breed technology.”

Key findings from the study include:

Almost every cloud journey is multicloud

• 93 percent of Australian enterprises surveyed are using or plan to use at least two cloud infrastructure providers and 30 percent are using four or more. Interestingly, in Australia there are more enterprises using 4-10 cloud infrastructure providers than there are using a single provider.
• 86 percent reported they are using or plan to use at least two cloud application providers (Software-as-a-Service), with 54 percent using cloud applications from five or more providers.
• This multicloud strategy allows IT departments to meet the specific technology needs of different teams across the organisation.

Disaster recovery, and cost optimisation are driving demand for multicloud strategies in Australia

• Globally, the top two drivers of multicloud strategies in enterprises are data sovereignty (41 percent) and cost optimisation (40 percent).
• The most significant driver of multicloud adoption in Australia is redundancy/disaster recovery. Australian enterprises are more motivated by redundancy/disaster recovery than any other market polled, with 32 percent of respondents citing it as the number one factor compared to just 21 percent globally.
• Australian organisations also cited cost optimisation and business unit/functional role preferences as the next most significant drivers for multicloud adoption, with 29 percent of organisations citing them as key motivators.
• In Australia, other drivers of multicloud strategies include regulatory compliance (25 percent), data sovereignty/cloud locality (25 percent) and best of breed cloud services and applications (25 percent).
• Multicloud strategies give enterprises more control over where and how their data is stored and used, while also ensuring businesses can control the costs of their cloud operations by adjusting which services they use from different providers.

Enterprise organisations are proactively planning multicloud strategies for the future

• Cost optimisation across different public cloud environments (46 percent) and geographic expansion are the most anticipated future use cases for multicloud in Australia, followed by data redundancy (39 percent)
• IT departments also plan to use multicloud strategies to support developer preferences (32 percent) and workload/data mobility (29 percent). The fact that IT departments are planning multicloud strategies shows that they see multicloud as a way to get ahead of their technology needs, instead of simply a tactic to react to crises.

Employee productivity functions and data processing among the top cloud workloads

• The top workloads Australian enterprises host with their primary IaaS/PaaS provider include employee productivity functions (57 percent), data processing, analytics and business intelligence (54 percent), and enterprise resource planning (46 percent). Customer-facing functions came in fourth at 39 percent.
• In Australia, the top types of workloads currently hosted with secondary IaaS/PaaS public cloud providers were high performance applications requiring low latency (50 percent), ERP (50 percent) and employee productivity functions (39 percent).
• Design, management or enablement of DevOps tools and practices (43 percent), optimisation of cloud infrastructure/deployment for cost or performance (39 percent) and management of containers or container management systems deployed in cloud (32 percent) were among the top types of third-party services Australian organisations use to support their cloud strategy and management needs.

“Multicloud is here, whether enterprises are ready for it or not. Business mergers can turn even the most stable of IT strategies into a multicloud environment overnight,” said Carlos Cienfuegos, vice president, Oracle Cloud ANZ. “Whether IT teams are starting their multicloud plans from scratch or already have an implementation in place but want to add best-of-breed cloud services, OCI’s distributed cloud can help. With the recent introduction of MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, customers have even more capabilities to help their multicloud strategies succeed.”

This research validates the approach OCI has taken with its distributed cloud and management offerings, which earned Oracle recognition as a leader in the recent Omdia Universe: Hybrid and Multicloud Management Solution, 2022–23 report (November 2022). Read a complimentary version of the report here(PDF).

Methodology

The survey data used in this report was collected by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and commissioned by Oracle. The global survey was fielded in the third quarter of 2022 and is based on a cross-industry sample of 1,500 enterprise respondents in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America. For the purposes of this survey, “enterprise” is defined as an organisation with more than 1,000 full-time employees (North America) or more than 500 full-time employees (other geographic regions).

About OCI’s Distributed Cloud

OCI’s distributed cloud offers customers the benefits of cloud with greater control over data residency, locality, and authority, even across multiple clouds. OCI’s distributed cloud features the following:

• Multicloud: OCI’s multicloud capabilities such as Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure and MySQL HeatWave give customers the choice to pick the best cloud provider for their applications and databases.
• Hybrid cloud: OCI delivers hybrid cloud services on-premises via Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and manages infrastructure in over 60 countries.
• Public cloud: Today, OCI operates 41 OCI regions in 22 countries, with 9 more planned, including two sovereign cloud regions for the EU.
• Dedicated cloud: OCI delivers dedicated regions for customers to run all Oracle cloud services in their own data centres, and Oracle Alloy will enable partners to customise the cloud services and experience for their customers.