Survey lifts covers on Cloud Promiscuity
Melvin Carvalho
http://cloudofdata.com/2013/04/survey-lifts-covers-on-cloud-promiscuity-good-thing-bad-thing-or-who-cares/
Figures from RightScale‘s latest State of the Cloud Report (free registration required) suggest “a strong interest in multi-cloud strategies” amongst respondents. The rationale for hybrid cloud (mixing a public cloud service like Amazon’s with something running in your own data centre, colocation site or hosting facility) is reasonably well understood, but why might companies choose to use more than one public cloud and/or more than one private cloud?
Surveys. Along with the loathsome infographic, they have become the default tool of the lazy PR person. I get loads of them, pretty much every day. And, almost without fail, they are a shocking waste of everyone’s time. Three out of the four people we gave some money to said our product was best. I don’t care. And I’m definitely not going to write about it. Every now and then, though, one that’s worth a little attention comes along. RightScale’s latest State of the Cloud, released last week, is one of those.
The sample is relatively small (just 625) and, as Network World‘s Brandon Butler emphasises, they
came from a community to [sic] people that had somehow, some way interacted with RightSacle [sic] in the past — they had registered on the company’s website, dropped a business card in a bowl at a trade show, or are a customer (although RightScale says only 30% of respondents were customers). The firm’s VP of Marketing Kim Weins says respondents to RightScale’s survey admittedly have some ‘affinity’ to cloud computing.
RightScale’s analysis of respondent demographics bears this out, with over half (51%) describing themselves as being from ‘Tech Software, Services, Hardware’ businesses. The broader community of cloud-consumers in manufacturing, financial services, media and the rest is far less well represented.
Survey Demographics. Image © RightScale 2013
The survey digs into a number of areas (see the Related articles, below), but it was the discussion of ‘multi-cloud’ that particularly caught my attention.
Image © RightScale 2013