NetApp today announced the results of its first industry research on cloud adoption. The responses of 750 CIOs and IT managers identified hybrid cloud as the most common adoption – over half of all respondents in each country indicate they are using a combination of private and public cloud.

More than half of the survey base also named security as a primary reason for adopting cloud, showing that trust in cloud providers continues to advance. Storage and backup ranked as the top use cases for cloud in all countries surveyed.

Detailed survey findings include: 

• Respondents across the board prefer the hybrid cloud. But they rely on different types of partners: Local service providers are the preferred hybrid cloud partner – as stated by a combined 26% of base respondents. Other options like hyperscalers (18%) and larger cloud service providers or global system integrators (17%) are less popular. Only 3% of all respondents claim they are not using any cloud services or are only planning to them. These ‘cloud sceptics’ are not linked to a specific company size, industry vertical, or cloud strategy.   
• Security and the cloud go together well: Over half of the base respondents – 56% – say that security is a primary motivation for cloud adoption consistently placing it in the top three cloud adoption motivations. This is evidence that trusting cloud providers with data is not perceived to be a security risk, an indication of further cloud adoption. Countries also put flexibility (55%) and cost savings (54%) high on the list. 
• Storage and backup are top workloads in the cloud – but there are many more. In the UK, 56% mentioned file storage, 51% said database, around 40% listed each analytics, disaster recovery, and SaaS. In Germany, file storage was number three (60%), database number four (57%), followed by disaster recovery (50%) and SaaS (45%). In France, database (56%) and file storage (53%) are number three and four. Other options like remote working, collaboration tools, analytics, SaaS and disaster recovery were used by 40% or less of French respondents. Document control as the least popular cloud workload in all countries.

“IT leaders look to the cloud to boost innovation. We believe that they should focus on three things to be successful, and these are choice, control and agility,” said Martin Warren, Cloud Solutions marketing manager, EMEA, at NetApp. “Enterprises need to be able to choose which workloads belong in the cloud and choose the best partners to move them across a hybrid landscape. They need to have visibility into cost, performance and data placement to make informed business and regulatory decisions across the full data lifecycle. And they want to harness every advantage of cloud economics – from new ideas to concepts to production. We have strong solutions and strategies to deliver all of this.” Sekete Patrick Maphopha, SE manager for Africa and Technology evangelist at NetApp

“Our conversations with customers underline the findings,” said Gregg Mearing, head of Managed Services at Node4. “Any enterprise consistently seeks to optimise its cost structures. But flexibility is just as important. Frankly, our customers don’t want to be locked in on premises and they don’t want to be locked into a public cloud. The NetApp Data Fabric is an elegant solution for this and gives the ability to switch between public clouds as needed. At the same time, there is 100% integration with our managed services portfolio, all virtually without CAPEX investment.”

NetApp delivers a Data Fabric to optimise the value of data in the cloud, whether customers run an on-premises IT environment that’s poised for cloud capabilities, or are already using the hybrid cloud, or are fully committed to a public cloud infrastructure. 

NetApp’s survey of 750 IT decision makers was conducted by Opinion Matters in December 2016.