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Earlier this year, cloud management company RightScale released the results of its fifth annual State of the Cloud Survey, the industry’s most comprehensive report on the use of cloud infrastructure. Assembled from survey responses of more than 1,000 IT professionals, the State of the Cloud report helps identify the latest trends in cloud computing and provides a detailed perspective on what’s happening in the cloud today.

Read on for a look at some of the highlights of the 2016 State of the Cloud Survey:

Hybrid cloud adoption sees strong growth.

cloud computing

The debate on whether public or private cloud options are best for businesses has been going strong for several years. Those for public cloud usage envision off-premise IT capabilities and applications for businesses, while those for the private cloud wish to enable cloud capabilities within existing, on-site IT departments. However, companies are increasingly shunning the either/or approach and are instead choosing a combination of both options. As former exclusive users of public cloud options increasingly add private cloud resource pools, 71 percent of 2016 survey respondents reported hybrid cloud use, up from 58 percent the year before. That leaves just 18 percent of respondents using public cloud only and a mere 6 percent of respondents using only private.

More enterprises are moving workloads to cloud.

Both public and private cloud saw an increased migration of enterprise workloads last year, according to survey respondents (the workload is the processing that a computer must handle at any given time, usually consisting of both the application programming running in the computer and the interactions of users with the computer’s applications). The number of enterprises that used public cloud to run more than 1,000 virtual machines (operating systems or application environments that are run on software instead of dedicated hardware) increased from 13 percent to 17 percent, while private cloud saw an even more dramatic increase, at 31 percent, up from 22 percent the previous year.

Security is no longer the top cloud challenge.

For the last three years, survey respondents have consistently cited security as the top cloud challenge, but this year’s participants identified a new challenge as their top concern: inadequate resources and expertise. Qualified expertise and proper resource support is becoming increasingly critical as more and more enterprises place a growing number of workloads in the cloud. However, such expertise does not seem to be as readily available as organizations would wish. Thirty-two percent of respondents identified a lack of resources and expertise as a cloud challenge, up from 27 percent last year. While security may have been unseated as the top concern, it is nevertheless running a close second, at 29 percent. Other challenges identified by respondents include compliance, difficulties managing multiple cloud services, and cost management.

Cloud cost management is an increasing concern, despite lagging optimization efforts.

Just 18 percent of survey respondents identified cloud cost management as a significant challenge in 2013, but according to the most recent survey, that figure now stands at 26 percent. However, it’s interesting to note that although companies are more concerned than ever about managing cloud costs, few companies are implementing the critical actions that would help optimize cloud costs and increase their savings, such as choosing lower-cost cloud or regions at the outset or moving workloads to a less costly cloud. The most common effort that enterprises and small- and medium-sized businesses are implementing (at a 45 percent implementation rate) is monitoring utilization and rightsizing instances (rightsizing involves identifying and maintaining the correct level of IT assets needed to support a company’s operations). Other potentially effective cloud cost optimization strategies that are less widely used include shutting down workloads during certain hours or automating shutdowns of temporary workloads.

DevOps is growing alongside cloud adoption.

In recent years, cloud adoption has been closely linked with the adoption of DevOps processes (the practice of having the entire service life cycle overseen by both operations and development engineers, who collaborate in all stages including design, development, and production support). It’s a pairing that makes sense, given that both DevOps and the cloud can help companies deliver new software applications and features faster and more efficiently. Seventy-four percent of 2016 survey respondents reported adopting DevOps, up from 66 percent the year before. A key part of this adoption consists of implementing configuration management tools, which allow companies to make more effective use of their servers and applications by standardizing and automating their deployment and configuration.