13 Nov 2014, 4:29 pm
According to the overall results of the survey of 659 decision makers with cloud responsibilities, including those in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the UK, US and Singapore, 79% of respondents said they plan to use multiple clouds, with only 8% not planning to do so.
Equinix, which operates data centres in 15 countries, said the figures indicated a trend among firms “budgeting for a multi-cloud migration strategy”. The survey indicated that 77% of respondents plan to use multiple clouds “within the next 12 months”.
More than 90% of respondents said their companies would deploy cloud-based services over the next 12 months. In addition, 58% of respondents said they planned to use clouds “operating in more than one country”.
Equinix said: “Over the next 12 months, a significant number of business applications such as storage/back-up, disaster recovery and business intelligence, among others, will be deployed to the cloud, and many of those workloads with third-party co-location providers.”
The survey also indicated that a “key challenge associated with moving business applications into the cloud is security”, with 85% of respondents listing it as their top concern, followed by performance and reliability, Equinix said.
Equinix said: “The majority of respondents indicate that direct connections to the cloud, those that bypass the public internet, are highly valuable with improved security being the top attribute associated with directly connecting to cloud services.”