Multi-Cloud Podcast: State of Market Maturity

On the most recent VMware Multi-Cloud Podcast, Eric Nielsen and I sat down to have a chat with David Gehringer, co-founder of Dimensional Research. Dimensional Research specializes in market research focused on understanding the trends affecting the technology landscape. David recently completed a major research study for VMware that looked at the adoption of app dev and IT operational practices related to multi-cloud maturity.

On the podcast David highlighted customer adoption findings around the eight critical areas of IT practice that correlate strongly with the ability of organizations to be successful in efforts to improve multi-cloud maturity. Those eight core practices were introduced in a blog I published earlier this year, so I won't recap them here. Instead, I will highlight a few of the more noteworthy findings that we discussed on the podcast.

Origin of Apps in the Cloud

We asked David about what he found when it comes to what's running in the cloud. When you think about it, apps running in the cloud, got there by one of the following means. They were A) migrated and now run as is, or B) migrated and then refactored in some way or C) were built net new in the cloud. Considering all respondents, we were interested in knowing what does the typical application portfolio look like as it relates to these three possible origin points?

What we found is that percentage of apps that fall into each category is pretty similar. More or less, a third, a third and a third. This suggests that organizations are very comfortable taking advantage of the cloud to support different modernization strategies. This also suggests that your typical organization needs to develop strong skills related to how quickly and efficiently they can migrate an application to the cloud but also around rapidly building net new, modern, cloud native applications.

Things We Take for Granted; Maybe We Shouldn't

Much of the survey looked at how organizations were doing on adopting constructs that have been in the market for a significant amount of time. Things like Agile and DevOps. In both instances what we found is that organizations aren't as far along as one might suspect. For most lower-level practices associated with these areas, the level of adoption topped off at about 50%. In many areas it was significantly less than even that.

We found similar results in the area of cloud governance. Findings were pretty consistent across the governance domains of financial management, operations, security and compliance. This suggest that organizations still have a long way to go in terms of achieving substantial competency in the area of cloud governance and that the lack of competency in these areas presents significant operational risk to many organizations.

A New Understanding for Multi-Cloud Emerging

While we didn't discuss this directly on the show, another very interesting finding in the survey was related to the changing understanding of the idea of multi-cloud. It's not a surprise that most organizations are using more than one cloud. That data has been put forth by multiple analyst firms for several years now. However, what you often found once you dug into that data, was that while most organizations were using more than one cloud, nearly all of the teams in a typical organization were using a single cloud - either primarily or entirely. What we found in this most recent survey is that now teams are becoming multi-cloud.

The survey included three bellwether questions related to how teams are becoming multi-cloud .

• Do you have teams with team members that need to have skills that allow them to work across more than one cloud?
• Are there teams that have to use more than one cloud to support the applications that they are responsible for?
• Do you have applications that have been architected to have dependencies on more than one cloud?

For every single one of these questions, at least 3 in 4 respondents said yes. This suggest that multi-cloud is no longer an abstract concept for the teams that are actually doing work in the cloud. This also means that issues such as multi-cloud complexity, and multi-cloud leverage, in all its forms (skills and knowledge, tool and platform standardization) are no longer just theoretical concerns. As multi-cloud becomes a reality at the team level, addressing issues of multi-cloud complexity also becomes an urgent need. Because of this, adopting best practices that help to simplify multi-cloud application development and cloud operations is becoming a much higher priority.

Get the Podcast

Eric and I covered a lot of territory in our conversation with David. Too much to recap in a single blog so I hope you get a chance to check out the podcast. I am working on publishing an eBook that summarizes all of the research we did in the area of multi-cloud use maturity. It should be forthcoming in the next few months. Once I publish it, I'll be sure to let everyone know via this blog.

Below are links to the podcast on various channels. I've also included the playlist for the VMware multi-cloud podcast on these same channels. At the end of this blog you will also find links to other blogs on the topic of multi-cloud maturity.

Links to this Podcast

YouTube

Soundcloud

Spotify

Multi-Cloud Podcast Playlists

If you are interested in other multi-cloud podcasts Eric and I have done in the past you can find links to playlists for the VMware Multi-Cloud Podcast below:

YouTube

SoundCloud

Multi-Cloud Use Maturity Blogs

Achieving multi-cloud use maturity - new eBook can help

Multi-Cloud Use Maturity - Competency in onboarding the cloud

Multi-Cloud Use Maturity - Leveraging cloud services

Multi-Cloud Use Maturity - Make sure DevOps practices are solid

Multi-Cloud Use Maturity - Data Center Modernization

Multi-Cloud Use Maturity - Cloud Financial Management

Multi-Cloud Use Maturity - Cloud Governance (non-financial)