Companies are increasingly moving to public clouds with many adopting a multicloud strategy, according to the latest research from SDxCentral, entitled Scaling Clouds - Infrastructure Orchestration and DevOps at Scale. Security, however, remains a top concern with cloud adoption.

The new report examines the use of hybrid (private and public) and multi-clouds (use of more than one public cloud), as well as cloud orchestration and automation tools. As part of it, the research team polled readers on their experiences with different orchestration, management, and DevOps capabilities.

Researchers conducted a survey on the SDxCentral site in which 76 respondents provided answers to multiple-choice questions on their experiences with cloud architectures and platforms.

The survey found that 72 percent of respondents used private clouds this year, compared to 70 percent of respondents back in 2015. More significantly, however, 71 percent used public clouds — up from just 43 percent three years ago. Only 7 percent said they were not currently using any cloud platforms.

Are companies using multiple public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google, or are they sticking with one provider? It turns out the results are almost evenly split. Forty-eight percent of respondents said they use multiple public clouds while 41 percent said they use a “single, dedicated public-cloud provider.”

Despite growing cloud adoption, challenges remain. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said “maintaining and upgrading cloud platforms” continues to be the biggest challenge associated with private cloud deployments. In 2015, “designing the right cloud platform,” was the top concern, but since 2016 the ongoing maintenance and management of cloud platforms has been the No. 1 challenge.

This year, security was the second biggest concern with private clouds, cited by 46 percent of survey participants, while designing the right cloud platform (36 percent) came in third.

When it comes to public clouds, “compliance and security issues” top the list at 62 percent. Meanwhile, 46 percent indicated “cost management” was a challenge, while 44 percent noted the “lack of visibility into underlying performance” hindered their public cloud deployments. Forty-one percent chose “predictability of costs.”

SDxCentral researchers also asked readers what hypervisor they used, and they found that VMware ESXi (74 percent) and KVM (58 percent) continue to dominate the market. These two have been the leaders since 2015.

When it comes to cloud management, VMware vCloud/vCenter and OpenStack came out on top. Sixty-four percent of respondents said they use VMware, while 62 percent use OpenStack. Just 8 percent use CloudStack. Interestingly, 17 percent do not use a cloud management platform.

Multicloud management platform adoption also continues to stall, with 80 percent of respondents not using any. That’s only a slight bump since 2015, when 86 percent indicated they had not deployed a multicloud management platform. Of those that do use a multicloud management product, Cloudify is the most commonly used.

On the other hand, DevOps tools are on the rise since SDxCentral’s first study in 2015. At that time, only 37 percent of organizations used them; today 64 percent say they use DevOps tools. The most popular include Red Hat Ansible (50 percent), Puppet (29 percent), and Chef (21 percent).

What’s preventing companies from using DevOps tools? Half (50 percent) cite “lack of expertise” as the reason, 18 percent said they “don’t have the scale that needs DevOps tools,” and 7 percent said the “tools don’t solve my problem.”