“The era of multi-cloud is here, driven by digital transformation, cost concerns and organizations wanting to avoid vendor lock-in. Incredibly, more than half of the respondents of our survey have already experienced business value from a multi-cloud strategy,” said Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO, HashiCorp. “However, not all organizations have been able to operationalize multi-cloud, as a result of skills shortages, inconsistent workflows across cloud environments, and teams working in silos.”

State of Cloud Adoption: Most Organizations Have Already Adopted Multi-Cloud
The survey showed that multi-cloud is overwhelmingly the standard operations model for IT organizations of all sizes, in all regions, and every industry, with 76% of survey respondents stating their organization has already adopted a multi-cloud strategy. Survey responses also indicate that this number is expected to increase to 86% in two years. Fifty-three percent of respondents believe that a multi-cloud strategy has helped to achieve the organization’s business goals, with large enterprises currently recognizing the most value from multi-cloud.

Digital transformation (34%) was cited by respondents as the number one most significant driver for multi-cloud adoption, followed by avoiding single vendor lock-in (30%) and cost reductions (28%). Digital transformation ranked highest among large enterprises, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and within the financial services vertical.

Of the big three public clouds, AWS was the leading cloud provider used by respondents (88%). However, respondents expect their use of AWS to remain the same during the next two years. Microsoft Azure ranked second in terms of use or intended use (74%), while Google Cloud was third (64%).

Cloud Spending — and Overspending
Cloud budgets vary by organization size, vertical, and geographic region. Forty percent of respondents’ organizations have an annual cloud spend of $100,000 to $2 million, while 27% of organizations spend less than $100,000 annually. Eighteen percent of organizations spend between $2 million and $10 million, and 15% spend more than $10 million annually.

Thirty-nine percent of respondents said their organization overspent their planned budgets on cloud, most often because of shifting priorities (29%) or because of unexpected needs related to COVID-19 (21%). Organizations with larger cloud budgets were more likely to have a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), with 66% of organizations with an annual cloud budget of $5 million to $50 million having one, compared to 40% of organizations overall surveyed.

Cloud Program Challenges and Inhibitors: Concerns about Costs and Skills
While the survey shows that the cloud — and multi-cloud in particular — is critical to meeting business goals, it also revealed several areas of concern for organizations.

Cloud inhibitors and challenges varied across regions, industry, and company size, as well as by component of the technology stack. Respondents stated the top inhibitors to multi-cloud programs are cost concerns (51%), security concerns (47%), and lack of in-house skills (41%). Similarly, organizations are struggling to operationalize multi-cloud. Top reasons include skills shortages (57%), budget constraints that affect headcount (27%), inconsistent workflows across cloud environments (33%), organizations and teams working in silos, and poor collaboration or processes that are too complex (29%).

Security: A Driver and Inhibitor for Cloud Adoption
Survey results showed that cloud security was both a driver and an inhibitor for multi-cloud adoption. Respondents agreed that the top cloud security concerns were data and privacy protection (40%), data theft (33%), and regulatory compliance (31%).

Staffing and skill shortages (26%) topped the list when respondents were asked about the most significant cloud security challenges. That was followed by insufficient tooling and no real-time visibility and insight (12% each).

Cloud Is Not Just a Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
There were some surprising results related to the effects of COVID-19 on organizations’ cloud adoption. Forty-six percent of respondents stated that the COVID-19 pandemic had not accelerated cloud adoption, while 54% of respondents stated that COVID-19 had some effect on their cloud adoption timelines. Nineteen percent said it had a low impact, accelerating efforts by six to 12 months, and 26% said it had a moderate impact, accelerating efforts by one to two years. Nine percent of organizations said the pandemic had accelerated their efforts by more than two years.

The top infrastructure initiatives that were accelerated as a result of COVID-19 were infrastructure as code (49%), container orchestration (41%), compliance and governance, and network infrastructure automation (33% each). However, it was notable that COVID-19 increased the use of open source software for 39% of respondents.

Methodology
The 2021 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey was conducted in February 2021. HashiCorp reached out to approximately 300,000 people for whom we had opt-in email addresses. To encourage responses, we offered an incentive drawing. We received 3,205 responses from around the world, though not all respondents answered all 34 questions. Responses by location were North America (39%); Europe, Middle East, and Africa (34%); Asia-Pacific (20%); Latin America (6%), no response (1%).

Resources
State of the Cloud Strategy Survey: https://hashi.co/3yCjG27
Blog: https://hashi.co/37AuD8C

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The post Survey Finds 76% of Enterprises Have Already Adopted a Multi-Cloud Strategy According to HashiCorp’s Inaugural State of Cloud Strategy appeared first on Digital IT News.

“HashiCorp gives us the powerful automation needed to unlock the cloud operating model to deliver applications faster, enable true self-service and optimize DevOps practices,” said Steve Bishop, Veristor CTO, and Executive Director of Forty8Fifty Labs. “HashiCorp is a core component of our cloud-powered solutions. We use HashiCorp across our DevOps development processes and cloud-powered infrastructure solutions to automate cloud provisioning, compliance and management while also protecting sensitive data based on user and workload identity.”

“Veristor and Forty8Fifty Labs are uniquely skilled at helping organizations shift to a cloud operating model with the expertise and experience to optimize infrastructure, ensure security and deliver applications faster,” said Michelle Graff, Global Channel Chief, HashiCorp. “We welcome them to the HashiCorp Partner ecosystem to build, deliver and support our joint customer leveraging HashiCorp enterprise software solutions. Like HashiCorp, they are focused on helping enterprises shift to the cloud quickly and securely.”

HashiCorp delivers a suite of solutions that deliver cloud infrastructure automation for operations, security, networking and application delivery. Each of HashiCorp’s solutions – including Terraform, which provides reproducible infrastructure as code, Vault, which protects sensitive data, Consul, which automates service-based networking in the cloud, and Nomad, which deploys and manages any containerized, legacy or batch application – are available as part of the suite of field-proven cloud and DevOps solutions from Veristor and Forty8Fifty Labs. For more information, visit: https://veristor.com/devops.

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“Running applications on cloud infrastructure helps enterprises transform their businesses, but creates challenges from infrastructure complexity, skills shortages, and the new types of security threats they face,” said Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp. “Our customers and community have been asking us for help to make it easier to get started with and to operate our products. With the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, we do the heavy lifting for them, making it much simpler for customers to get up and running with Consul as their production-ready service networking solution. We expect HCP to help organizations more quickly achieve their digital transformation initiatives.”

For enterprises working to deliver the business value of cloud but struggling with these skills and staffing shortages, HCP Consul and HCP Vault minimize operational burden, and allow organizations to focus on feature delivery and subsequently deliver more value to the business faster.

HCP provides push-button deployments of fully managed Consul and Vault offerings, with a vision to deliver managed offerings for all HashiCorp products across all cloud providers, enabling a consistent workflow to effectively operate multi-cloud environments. The HashiCorp Cloud Platform is available with initial support on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We are pleased to support HCP Consul and HCP Vault on AWS,” said Deepak Singh, vice president, Compute Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Customers can immediately realize automation benefits with HCP Consul, a production-ready, fully managed service mesh solution, which will help users to connect and secure connections between AWS workloads faster and with fewer resources via push-button deployment of fully managed clusters pre-configured for development and production.”

Together, HCP Vault and HCP Consul are key pieces of a zero trust security approach to cloud management and operations. HashiCorp enables zero trust security by placing trusted identity at the core of all critical pieces of modern security automation: machine authentication and authorization, machine-to-machine access, and human authentication and authorization, and human-to-machine access.

“Enterprises need to move faster and become more agile, through the practice of enterprise acceleration strategies,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and VP, Constellation Research. “Right now the management of multi-cloud next generation applications is a massive challenge. HashiCorp addresses this with the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, and it is good to see the first two services debuting on the platform with Consul and Vault. Effectively, HashiCorp is enabling enterprises to operate more efficiently in the era of infinite computing, delivering an infinite compute platform with HCP, allowing enterprises to operate in a multi-cloud environment faster and more efficiently.”

HCP Customer Adoption
During the HCP Consul and HCP Vault beta programs, more than 2,000 organizations signed up to participate, underscoring early interest for the HashiCorp-managed offerings.

HashiCorp customer VEERUM, a global SaaS provider that applies data visualization software to asset ownership, participated in the HCP Consul beta. VEERUM used HCP Consul initially to provide service discovery for their containerized workloads with plans to move to a full service mesh implementation with Consul. Using HCP Consul helps VEERUM offload the operational burden from VEERUM’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, allowing them to focus on application improvements instead.

“VEERUM delivers its industry-leading visualization application to the world’s largest energy producers and builders. Using HCP Consul enables VEERUM to focus on client delivery requirements without the complexity of managing the underlying service network infrastructure Consul provides,” said Anderson Carvalho, lead SRE at VEERUM. “By minimizing overhead, the VEERUM team can focus on nurturing client relationships and implementing product updates, enabling scalable business growth.”

Contaim, another HCP Consul beta participant, offers users an easy way to host gaming applications through its cloud-based game server manager. Contaim uses Consul to provide service discovery and service mesh to connect and secure services across their containerized and bare metal environments.

“Deploying HCP Consul was incredibly simple — from logging into the account to deploying the HashiCorp Virtual Network and peering with Amazon VPCs — we were able to set it up easily,” said Scott Plunkett, founder, Contaim. “With HCP Consul, Contaim will be able to lower operational overhead and decrease the infrastructure required to manage and monitor Consul.”

About HCP Consul
HCP Consul is a production-ready, fully managed service mesh and service networking offering. Including both the open source and enterprise versions of Consul, HCP Consul is designed to help organizations discover, automate, and secure any service-to-service communications across any runtime platform. Unlike self-managed solutions, HCP Consul is designed to reduce the operational complexity of providing service discovery or running a service mesh. HCP Consul is available for individuals looking to consume Consul on-demand via self-service or as a shared service for large-scale enterprises.

HCP Consul offers platform-agnostic secure service networking and simplified service discovery across environments, which include Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and other AWS application environments using a Consul multi-platform service mesh.

About HCP Vault
HCP Vault is a HashiCorp-managed service for secrets management and data encryption. Including both the open source and enterprise versions of Vault. HCP Vault secures, stores, and tightly controls access to tokens, passwords, certificates, and encryption keys for protecting secrets and other sensitive data.

HCP Vault enables organizations to leverage all of the security and power of Vault without the overhead and complexity, maintenance, and associated costs. It provides push-button deployment, fully managed upgrades, backups, and monitoring, so organizations can focus on adoption and integration. HCP Vault provides clusters to fit into any environment and workload, and will offer flexible packaging to fit developers, development teams, and organizations of different sizes.

Availability
HCP Consul is now generally available with hourly and annual pricing. HCP Vault is currently available in public beta and is free during the beta period. To get started, visit www.hashicorp.com/cloud-platform

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