90% of companies use cloud, but core app modernization lags

Dive Brief:

Businesses are making inroads in cloud adoption, with implementation at nine in 10 companies, up from 69% in 2020, according to a Harvey Nash survey of more than 2,100 digital leaders released Monday.
Harvey Nash's findings fall in line with data from O'Reilly, which also shows 90% of organizations using the cloud, according to the survey of 2,834 respondents released Monday. Half of respondents plan to migrate 50% or more of their applications to the cloud next year.
One-third of companies placed most of their core applications in the cloud, though just 12% report all core applications are cloud-based, Harvey Nash finds. Cloud app adoption is slightly higher for small organizations, where 35% have most and 14% have all applications in the cloud.

Dive Insight:

One of the most significant changes in enterprise cloud adoption this year is in the type of implementation. Three in five organizations categorize their cloud adoption as a large implementation, up from 44% in 2019, according to Harvey Nash data.

While companies are creating cloud-first policies, in search of a more nimble technology operating environment, there are differences in adoption by company size or sector.

Retail and e-commerce, media and entertainment, finance and banking, and software are the industries with the highest cloud use, according to O'Reilly. Electronics and hardware and government sectors deploy cloud less frequently.

Even with a few company outliers, the majority of organizations are using the cloud, evidenced by the high growth rates of public cloud providers. The cloud infrastructure services market alone reached $45 billion in Q3, up 37% year over year, according to Synergy Research Group data. All told, in the first half of 2021, the cloud market reached $235 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year.

Companies are changing how they implement cloud workloads, particularly when it comes to infrastructure as a service. Public cloud still receives the most attention, present in two-thirds of deployments, followed by private cloud for 45% of O'Reilly respondents.

Multicloud is found in almost one-quarter of deployments, about the same as last year, O'Reilly found. But multicloud is taking off with large-scale providers, including Wells Fargo, which unveiled its cloud strategy built across Microsoft and Google in September.

Adoption of multicloud coincides with companies rolling out highly controlled and strict cloud plans, the opposite of the gradual accumulation of services companies have defaulted to in the past.