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From one cloud to many: The current trend of cloud adoption

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Over the next 12 months, the majority of business applications will be deployed to the cloud, with most of these being deployed to multiple clouds across multiple geographies.

That’s the key trend from a survey conducted by Equinix, in which the overwhelming majority of the 659 global respondents (77%) said they planned to deploy to multiple clouds in the next year, and a similar number (74%) expect a larger budget in 2015 for cloud services.

91% of new cloud-based offerings will be deployed in the organisation over the coming 12 months, while 45% of new cloud-based apps will be deployed at a third party colocation provider.

It’s clear that multiple cloud deployments are the way forward, but the report also made mention of how this was going to take place: interconnected data centres. 87% of respondents indicates that interconnection is required to meet cloud performance objectives, while 85% argue that direct connections to cloud providers are “highly valued.”

The report found that globally, 11% of firms are planning to deploy more than 10 cloud services in the next 12 months, compared with only 6% for North America. It’s an interesting trend, and shows how cloud deployments are catching up outside the US. 38% of firms globally are going to deploy between three and five services, compared to 30% for North America.

Globally, 7% said they were expecting to deploy to multiple clouds over the next three months; this again compares favourably with just 1% for North America. Only a minimal number (15% globally, 17% North America) said the process will take more than 12 months. Three quarters (74%) of global respondents say they will be deploying in multiple countries in some capacity.

“What surprised us about this survey is how quickly multi-cloud strategies are becoming the norm worldwide,” commented Ihab Tarazi, Equinix CTO. “Businesses have discovered that colocation provides a meaningful ROI for WAN optimisation, and it is clear that multi cloud deployment will improve the ROI even more.”

The report comprised IT decision makers, including IT executives (44%), IT managers (54%) and IT service providers (2%).