What’s the future of cloud? LogicMonitor surveyed 135 cloud professionals at AWS re:Invent to find out. Of the cloud professionals polled, 43% work in IT at an organization with about 1,500 employees. They worked varying roles, with 58% working in staff roles and 42% working in management positions. Let’s delve into those results – and consider insights from technology giants like Microsoft (News - Alert), Google, Amazon and IBM – to explore what’s to come with the future of hybrid and multicloud.

Gartner projects that the public cloud market will grow 17.3% this year – from $175.8 billion in 2018 to $206.2 billion. The competition will likely continue to heat up among the major cloud companies, with Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) and platform as-a-service (PaaS) are driving the “next wave” of cloud. But overall, breadth and depth will become more important for hybrid environments, and strategic initiatives will result in a need for multicloud and hybrid cloud.

On-premises vs. cloud
Today, enterprise workloads are fairly evenly divided between on-premises (46%) and cloud (44%), according to the survey results. When the enterprises surveyed decide what to store on-premises vs. what to store in the cloud, certain benefits of each choice stood out.

Storing workloads on-premises appeals to enterprises because of considerations such as security, cost, compliance, a need to store data closer to where it’s used (for latency and performance reasons) and sensitive data needing to be kept off-cloud. Storing workloads in the cloud also has its benefits, including reliability, performance, flexibility, scalability and agility.

By 2020, cloud will grow more dominant, with cloud workloads increasing to 63% and on-premises ones decreasing to 25%, according to the survey.

Multi-Cloud
Today, enterprises surveyed store 11% of their workloads both on-premises and in the cloud, and by 2020, they predict that 12% of workloads will be hybrid. A third of those surveyed believe it will be six or more years before a single cloud platform handles all of their workloads. One in five believe that will take at least 10 years. For now, the workload is often spread across several different cloud platforms.

Our survey found that 54% of survey respondents use multiple cloud platforms for both production and experimentation, and 28% use multiple cloud platforms strictly for production. Diving into what cloud platforms these organizations are experimenting with, 24% said the Azure Stack while 22% said VMware Cloud on AWS.

A multi-cloud approach is appealing for a few reasons. It’s considered more cost-effective, reliable and secure and less latent and redundant. Multi-cloud is also viewed as better at helping enterprises find the optimal application environment.

When looking at public cloud vendors Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google (News - Alert) Cloud Platform, 97% of survey respondents are using AWS in their production or experimenting, 47% are using Azure and 39% are using Google Cloud.

If we just take production into consideration, enterprises report using AWS (81%); Azure (28%); and Google Cloud (13%), not too surprising given that these were attendees at an AWS conference. If we’re just talking about experimenting, survey respondents say they use Google Cloud (26%); Azure (19%); and AWS (16%).

While we don’t know what the future holds, it almost certainly involves the cloud. And the availability of multiple cloud options will only result in a healthy competition, and therefore better solutions for the organizations looking to harness their power.