Research Objectives
As organizations continue to adopt multiple public cloud providers, maintain multiple data centers, and scale edge and colocation environments, IT decision makers must consider a wealth of locations to deploy new workloads and migrate existing workloads. Where an application is deployed depends on numerous factors, including the type of application, the needs of the application, the needs of the business, and the priorities of the organization.
To gain insight into the strategy, process, personas, and considerations involved in multi-cloud applications deployment migration decisions, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 350 IT professionals in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, and managing applications for their organization.
This study sought to answer the following questions:
- How do organizations distribute IT budgets across application deployment locations, including on-premises, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), edge, and colocation?
- Among users of public cloud services, how are IT budgets distributed between primary and secondary providers?
- How do organizations expect their spending on application deployment locations to change in the next 24 months?
- Do organizations have preferred cloud vendors they default to for application deployments, or do they choose providers based primarily on the application or cost?
- What role do internal groups play in determining deployment plans and locations for new and existing applications?
- What types of applications drive the use of one public cloud infrastructure provider over another?
- What application attributes or requirements for new applications most influence the choice of provider?
- What percentage of existing applications are strong, potential, or not candidates to move to public cloud services over the next five years? Which applications are not candidates, and why not?
- What are organizations’ strategies for existing applications in terms of modernization and migration?
- When and how are cloud cost optimization tools in the application deployment decision process?
- Which factors influence decisions when evaluating the cost of cloud application deployments?
- What is the adoption status of distributed applications in today’s IT environments?
- How many inter-cloud application integrations do organizations currently manage?
- What challenges do organizations encounter when monitoring, measuring, and ensuring SLA adherence for applications that rely on inter-cloud integrations?
- What application types are unsuitable for use as distributed applications and inter-cloud integration?
- Why do organizations use more than one public cloud infrastructure provider? What applications or application requirements lead to the use of secondary providers?
- What KPIs are used to measure the value and effectiveness of application deployment locations?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
