Economic Volatility and Demands for Flexibility Shape the Future of Multi-Cloud Services, Reveals Cockroach Labs' 2024 Report

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Nov 14, 2023, 09:00 ET

The "The State of Multi-Cloud" Report sheds light on the current landscape of multi-cloud adoption

NEW YORK, Nov. 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Cockroach Labs, a leading provider of cloud-native distributed SQL databases, today unveils its "The State of Multi-Cloud" report. According to the report, cloud architects and engineers agree on the many benefits (and challenges) of multi-cloud—but that doesn't mean they're happy with cloud service providers (CSPs). Among engineering leaders using multi-cloud, an alarming 37% cite a lack of integration and tools that work across multiple clouds, reveals a survey of 300 IT cloud architects and engineers in the U.S., UK, and Germany conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Cockroach Labs.

Companies have been moving data, applications, and development work to the cloud in greater numbers for the past several years. According to Gartner® research, "By 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services, which is an increase from 20% in 2020."1 Most commonly, organizations have leaned heavily on the three biggest clouds in the market for this transition. Together, AWS, Microsoft and Google made up 66% of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market at the start of the year, according to several reports. However, a multi-cloud strategy can also usher in new challenges, but many of them stem from the same fundamental problem–each cloud has its own idiosyncrasies. When working with multiple clouds, negotiating these small differences can lead to large problems.

Report highlights include:

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud setups have become the norm, with 50% of respondents indicating their companies leverage multi-cloud, and an additional 26% utilizing hybrid cloud configurations.
Adoption is being driven by business concerns, not technical concerns. The largest drivers of multi-cloud adoption are complying with current and future regulations, avoiding vendor lock-in, and gaining leverage in cloud contract negotiations.
Respondents stressed that while multi-cloud solutions may offer enhanced resilience, the technical case was difficult to make due to the challenge of multi-cloud deployments. Moreover, companies cited they could achieve goals by deploying across multiple regions within a single cloud.
The EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is driving further multi-cloud adoption. Respondents (38% overall) indicated multi-cloud was a crucial component in preparation for DORA.
Vendor lock-in was the most cited reason for going multi-cloud among large companies (45%). But in many cases, these companies are still concentrated on a single cloud provider highlighting the importance of maintaining flexibility and the possibility of migration, rather than spreading workloads across multiple clouds.
Economic uncertainty was identified as a factor likely to fuel the growth of multi-cloud adoption (66% overall). However a small percentage of respondents (12% overall) said it could decrease or even stop the spread of multi-cloud in their industries.

Form3, a global payment technology platform and Cockroach Labs customer, chose to leverage CockroachDB to build a scalable, resilient, and advanced multi-cloud infrastructure. The company had to privately network all the clouds together and maintain network connectivity through multiple datacenters: "The idea of our platform is to be able to survive a cloud vendor outage, so we're not going to be dependent on any cloud vendor," said Kevin Holditch, head of platform, Form3, to ERP Today. "We're going to have a Kubernetes cluster in each cloud vendor — so Azure, AWS, GCP – and run CockroachDB across the three."

Cockroach Labs expects multi-cloud adoption to continue expanding among companies that can implement it efficiently and have a genuine need for it. The company lists the following as reasons to consider multi-cloud: complying with regulations, avoiding vendor lock-in, customer requirements, negotiating power, and in some limited cases resilience and cost optimization. Larger organizations, particularly those in heavily regulated sectors like finance and real-money gaming—and savvy companies that can leverage the right tools and approaches to adopt multi-cloud without introducing too much complexity will continue to profit from multi-cloud. Conversely, adoption may contract among companies that adopt multi-cloud without a genuine need or struggle to implement it efficiently, leading to increased costs and reduced return on investment.

"When creating and executing a multi-cloud strategy, organizations need to consider everything from infrastructure costs and regulatory concerns to the need for cloud-specific specialists and tooling," said Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer at Cockroach Labs. "Despite this complexity, our data suggests that multi-cloud adoption will likely accelerate. As companies look to achieve the benefits of this approach, they should think through the full investment required to create and operate these environments."

To download the full report, click here. To try CockroachDB click here.

Methodology
The quantitative data presented in this report comes from a survey that Cockroach Labs commissioned. The survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com) among 300 cloud architects and engineers in the US, UK, and Germany, from July 18–24, 2023, using an email invitation and an online survey. All respondents were compensated for participating in the survey, in line with industry practice

Results of any sample are subject to sampling variation. The magnitude of the variation is measurable and is affected by the number of interviews and the level of the percentages expressing the results. For the interviews conducted in this particular study, the chances are 95 in 100 that a survey result does not vary, plus or minus, by more than 5.7 percentage points at the total level, and 9.8 percentage points at the market level, from the result that would be obtained if interviews had been conducted with all persons in the universe represented by the sample.

The qualitative data comes from interviews conducted with Cockroach Labs employees, primarily engineers and sales engineers, between June and August of 2023. The opinions presented in this report are based on their experiences building CockroachDB as a multi-cloud product and their experiences working with CockroachDB customers and prospects with multi-cloud needs.

About Cockroach Labs:
Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the cloud-native, distributed SQL database designed to enable global businesses to build and operate world-changing applications. CockroachDB is trusted to run mission-critical workloads for some of the world's largest enterprises, including Bose, Comcast, Hard Rock Digital, Fortune 50 financial institutions, as well as category leaders in retail and media.

¹Gartner, How Cloud Adoption Will Increase Opex Budgets, May 2022.

SOURCE Cockroach Labs