The cloud market is maturing, and as any market matures, the leaders in that market become entrenched–often leading to vendor lock-in. For public cloud platforms, the risk of this lock-in is less pronounced than in other markets, as reliance on containerization of applications enables IT professionals to seamlessly deploy anywhere, and easily migrate applications across different platforms.

Some 26% of environments currently use containerized applications, according to the 2019 State of Multicloud report published Wednesday by Turbonomic. This figure is expected to nearly double by 2021, survey respondents indicated. Likewise, trust in containerization is sufficiently high that nearly one-third of containerized applications are mission critical, according to the report.

SEE: Managing the multicloud (ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature) | Download the free PDF version (TechRepublic)

When it comes to cloud challenges, only 53% of respondents were most concerned about vendor lock-in, with 47% indicating that the convenience of abstracted infrastructure was their primary factor for using cloud services. Another 32% of respondents said they were using two cloud platforms, while 29% use three or more. Some 83% of respondents believe workloads will move easily across clouds, according to the report.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the most-used cloud platform, with 55% of respondents reporting using AWS. Microsoft Azure was a close second at 52%, and 45% of respondents operate a private cloud as part of a hybrid cloud deployment. Only 22% indicated using Google Cloud Platform, while 9% of respondents said they use no cloud computing services at all.

Of the cloud-managed services expected to grow the most over the next 18 months, Desktop as a Service was among the highest, with 17% of respondents planning to deploy. This growth can likely be attributed to the end of Windows 7 support, for which Microsoft will begin “nagging remaining Windows 7 holdouts in April,” according to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley.

To learn more about multicloud, check out “Rise of multicloud: 58% of businesses using combination of AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud,” and “How IBM Watson’s move to multicloud could help your business adopt AI.”


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