Dive Brief:

• Almost 90% of cloud technology decision-makers use a multicloud solution for their current cloud strategy, according to a study by Forrester for Virtustream of more than 700 respondents. Seventy percent of respondents said they use the public cloud for new and existing applications.

• Nearly one-fourth of respondents are using a public cloud to augment on-premise infrastructure, but only 4% are dedicating their multicloud strategy to developing applications with components deployed on multiple clouds.

• Cloud strategy is split nearly 50-50 in organizations between a holistic design and an ad hoc approach. Still, 72% of respondents plan on re-evaluating or changing their cloud strategy in the next two years.

Dive Insight:

Workloads in the cloud are forecast to grow from 18% to 34% over the next three years, which means companies will have to embrace a hybrid solution. Still, as migration progresses companies may find that one vendor does not fulfill all necessary needs.

Forrester found that almost 70% of respondents consider migration as part of their overall cloud strategy, but migration requires a strategy of its own. Companies are moving away from "lift and shift" and more to a "lift and extend" strategy. Still, less than half of organizations plan on running 51% to 75% of applications on the cloud over the next 12 to 24 months.

Organizations are using multiple clouds to address problems that can't be solved on their primary cloud, but it sometimes leads to vendor lock-in. AWS, in particular, was one of the original cloud infrastructure providers, which lead many companies to adopting it early on.

Vendor lock-in is a point to consider, despite companies like Amazon working to prevent customers from feeling "trapped." However, it is hard to adopt another cloud provider after a company has already committed time and money to the process of adopting the first one. This is in part due to developers devoting time to learn specific APIs for a single cloud vendor.