A new study from data virtualisation provider Denodo makes for an interesting snapshot of where cloud migration trends sit today, with security remaining top of mind and hybrid and multi-cloud architectures key.

The findings of the study, which surveyed more than 200 business executives and IT professionals, would not have come as a major surprise to regular readers of this publication. Perhaps some of the figures may have been a little on the low side. 36% of organisations polled said they were currently in the process of migrating workloads to the cloud, with almost 20% saying they were in the advanced stages of implementation.

46% of those polled said they leveraged a hybrid cloud model, with private cloud (33.6%), multi-cloud (32.6%) and public cloud (31.6%) all polling similarly. Cost optimisation (54%) the most frequently cited motivating factor for multi-cloud, ahead of securing a best in breed offering (45%) – with echoes to a recent Turbonomic study – and avoiding vendor lock-in (38%).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure were the clear one-two when it came to most widely used providers, polling 67% and 60% of the vote respectively. Google Cloud, cited by 26% of respondents, trailed.

When it came to security, more than half (52%) of respondents cited it as a key concern, ahead of managing and tracking cloud spend (44%) and a lack of cloud skills (31%). In one statistic that may have gone against the usual trend, Docker – cited by 31% of those polled – was the most popular container technology ahead of Kubernetes (21%).

Naturally, given its heritage, Denodo advocates data virtualisation – where applications can retrieve and manipulate data without knowing where it is located or how it is formatted – as a tool to help organisations manage the complexity of their multi-cloud workloads.

“While organisations continue to adopt cloud solutions at a fast pace, they soon realise that the migration of critical enterprise information resources is a challenge due to today’s complex, big data landscape,” said Ravi Shankar, Denodo chief marketing officer. “Using data virtualisation, businesses alleviate these pain points by building a data services architecture that allows them to gain the maximum benefits from their data and take advantage of cloud modernisation, analytics and hybrid data fabric.”

You can read the full report here (email required).

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