The cloud-first enterprise is gaining in prominence, through multi-cloud strategies, losing data centres, and adopting cloud-native infrastructures.

That is the key finding from a new report released by hybrid cloud IT operations management provider OpsRamp. The study, which polled IT leaders in companies with 500 or more employees, also found that public cloud services are grabbing a bigger share of IT budgets, and that security – again – is the primary reason for reticent companies sitting it out.

While the areas the paper covers have been commonly reported in this publication, it is interesting to see the trends all in one place. More than half of respondents say they have been using public cloud for more than three years, with 7% saying they have done for more than seven. Despite this, only 29% of those polled said their level of cloud adoption was ‘mature’, compared with 50% for ‘developing’ and 21% for ‘emerging’.

When it came to benefits of cloud-native infrastructure, scalability and flexibility, cited by 62% of those polled, came out on top, ahead of reduced capital investments (47%) and consumption-based pricing models (47%). More than half (53%) added that 30% to 50% of IT budgets would be cloud-based in the near future, while an additional 27% said more than half their IT budget would be.

“The survey results are consistent with what we’re hearing from customers and partners,” said Varma Kunaparaju, OpsRamp co-founder and CEO. “Cloud is becoming a bigger part of their IT portfolio, they’re likely to use more than one cloud platform, and oversight and management of cloud services is paramount.

“We expect these trends to accelerate over time, as the cost, scalability and flexibility advantages of cloud services become even more obvious.”

As far back as 2015, this publication wrote that ‘multi-cloud was the new holy grail of cloud computing’. The survey results showed that this was essentially a reality today; three quarters of respondents said they expect to work with different cloud providers for their business needs, with Microsoft Azure – not for the first time – the most popular, ahead of Amazon Web Services and Google.

You can read the full report here.