Multicloud is the new reality in enterprise technology according to a study from 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The global study collected information from 1,500 executives and senior decision-makers at enterprises – including India – about how they use the cloud within their organisation and found that almost every cloud journey is now becoming a multicloud journey. Read the full global report here.

Key findings from the study include:

Almost every cloud journey is multicloud

• 98 percent of enterprises surveyed are using or plan to use at least two cloud infrastructure providers and 31 percent are using four or more.
• 96 percent reported they are using or plan to use at least two cloud application providers (Software-as-a-Service), with 45 percent using cloud applications from five or more providers.
• This multicloud strategy allows IT departments to meet the specific technology needs of different teams across the organization.

Data sovereignty and cost optimization are driving demand for multicloud strategies

• The top two drivers of multicloud strategies in enterprises are data sovereignty (41 percent) and cost optimization (40 percent).
• Other drivers of multicloud strategies include business agility and innovation (30 percent), best of breed cloud services and applications (25 percent) and cloud vendor
• lock-in concerns (25 percent).
• Multicloud strategies give enterprises more control over where and how their data is stored and used, while also ensuring businesses can control the costs of their cloud operations by adjusting which services they use from different providers.

Enterprise organizations are proactively planning multicloud strategies for the future

• Data redundancy (54 percent) is the most anticipated future use case, followed by data mobility (49 percent) and cost optimization across public clouds (42 percent).
• IT departments also plan to use multicloud strategies for risk mitigation for the entire IT environment (40 percent) and geographic expansion or global service delivery (38 percent).
• The fact that IT departments are planning multicloud strategies shows that they see multicloud as a way to get ahead of their technology needs, instead of simply a tactic to react to crises.

Approach and Expectation from Multicloud

• (59 percent) of Indian enterprises believe Economics as the most important motivating factor for taking a multicloud approach to its cloud infrastructure
• In India, 70 percent of respondents said Multicloud guarantees cost optimization for their organization’s public cloud spending
• Cloud cost optimization (33 percent), Common security or governance policy across clouds (31 percent) and Integration with existing toolsets used for on-premises infrastructure (31 percent) are some of the most predicted outcomes from Multicloud management platform

“Multicloud is here, whether enterprises are ready for it or not. Business mergers can turn even the most stable of IT strategies into a multicloud environment overnight,” said Leo Leung, vice president, OCI and Oracle Technology. “Whether IT teams are starting their multicloud plans from scratch or already have an implementation in place but want to add best-of-breed cloud services, OCI’s distributed cloud can help. With the recent introduction of MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, customers have even more capabilities to help their multicloud strategies succeed.”

This research validates the approach OCI has taken with its distributed cloud and management offerings, which earned Oracle recognition as a leader in the recent Omdia Universe: Hybrid and Multicloud Management Solution, 2022–23 report (December 2022).