Public Cloud on the Rise While Private Cloud Usage Declines

Wyatt CarlsonJanuary 18, 2017
12:01 am PT

The use of public clouds has nearly doubled to 57 percent from 30 percent since 2012, while private cloud use has dropped to 40 percent from 52 percent, according to an Interop ITX and InformationWeek survey.

Even further, the respondents who use a private cloud estimate a 12 percent drop between current and future usage, with 28 percent expecting to use a private cloud for new projects.

The move away from private clouds toward public clouds is primarily driven by scalability, performance, and better or faster access to resources. According to the survey, the success of the public cloud is directly related to being able to deploy hardware resources to run software quickly.

Among the respondents using the public cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has seen the biggest increase in the past two years, to 52 percent from 39 percent. Similarly, Google Cloud jumped to 38 percent from 23 percent, and Azure dropped to 38 percent from 48 percent in the same timeframe.

With little surprise, the decline of private clouds has directly affected the adoption and use of hybrid clouds as well. Specifically, latency and dropped connections between the two clouds has caused errors that can be difficult to debug and fix, leaving many security vulnerabilities. Respondents rated security issues as the most significant challenge in private and hybrid cloud adoption by far, according to the survey.

Cloud management, however, is a factor that is preventing organizations from realizing the full benefits of all types of clouds, the survey says. While some respondents said they use custom code to automate and orchestrate workloads, most said they are using cloud management software, which is still largely flawed, the survey says.

Regarding Docker and containers, only 7 percent of respondents said they were using containers in production, almost half were considering deploying them.

It is clear that the migration to the public cloud is happening, but what is less clear, according to the survey, is which tools will be used to automate and manage it.