In January 2016, Rightscale, a cloud management company, published its annual State of the Cloud Survey. This survey is considered particularly noteworthy because it is the largest survey focused on the use of IaaS. Additionally, respondents are actual cloud buyers and users. In this 2016 survey, 1060 IT professionals were asked about their cloud adoption and 42% of the respondents represented over 1000 employee organizations. The margin of error is 3,07 %

1.Public cloud is crushing private cloud

Survey numbers show that private cloud adoption has increased 14 percentage points in a year from 63% to 77%. It seems that private cloud is growing fast and the hype is also quite strong. However, when one takes a closer look at the survey report, the future of private cloud does not seem glowing at all. Public cloud giant Amazon AWS grew 69% in a year, and the second largest, Microsoft Azure, grew even faster (i.e. 127% year-over-year). Today, AWS is already bigger than the entire private cloud market, which is estimated to be about $7 billion.

2. Microsoft Azure is catching Amazon AWS

Azure (IaaS+PaaS) is growing fastest of the major public cloud vendors and is catching AWS. According to the survey results, Azure is especially strong in the enterprise segment. From the respondents that represent organizations of more than 1,000 employees:

• 26% runs apps on Azure ja 56% on AWS
• 33% experiments with Azure ja 16% with AWS
• 17% plans to use Azure ja 8% plan to use AWS

3. Lack of resources/expertise picked up security as the #1 cloud challenge

Since 2013, Rightscale survey results have shown that security is the top cloud challenge. In 2016, 32% of the respondents said lack of resources/expertise is the greatest challenge (security:29%)

Additional Thoughts

Private cloud will be needed for the foreseeable future, as hybrid cloud will be the controlled stepping-stone for many large organizations on their path to public cloud. Otherwise, it seems that the private cloud market will be marginal and private cloud will be used in special cases.

When it comes to cloud market analyses, there is significant discussion concerning the intriguing race between Amazon and Microsoft, but little mention as to repercussions in the future. At the end of the day, it’s likely the cloud market will be largely shared by the two most alluring and hyper-scaling public cloud vendors that will attract everybody – including customers and present-day competitors.

Here is the link to the site where you can download the Rightscale 2016 State of the Cloud Report: https://www.rightscale.com/lp/state-of-the-cloud