Dive Brief:

• Hybrid and multi-cloud adoption continues to grow in the enterprise, with some companies reporting using an average of eight clouds, according to the 2017 State of the Cloud survey released by RightScale Wednesday.

• The sixth annual survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals found 85% of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy, up from 82% in 2016. Meanwhile, private cloud adoption fell from 77% to 72%.

• The survey also revealed optimizing cloud costs is the top cloud initiative, while cloud challenges, including security concerns, continue to decrease.

Dive Insight:

Businesses are more commonly choosing to work with more than one cloud provider to meet multiple needs. A 2016 survey of 314 public cloud customers by Cowen & Co. found the typical public cloud customer used 2.86 cloud providers. RightScale's new numbers indicate that number has risen dramatically.

A multi cloud strategy can offer a number of benefits, such as redundancy and disaster recovery, but using more than one cloud provider is not necessarily a cheap way to go. Survey respondents estimated 30% of cloud spend is wasted, while RightScale measured actual waste between 30% — 45%.

RightScale also found AWS adoption was flat among survey respondents, while Microsoft Azure continued to gain ground. A study released last week by Synergy Research Group found AWS now controls about 40% of the cloud market, and Microsoft, Google and IBM together control about 23%.