A recent study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value in conjunction with Oxford Economics found that only three percent said they would use a single private or public cloud in 2021, up from 29 percent in 2019.
The survey polled 7,164 C-suite executives across 29 industries about their cloud formations.
Vendor lock-in was the main reason for the shift to multiple clouds. Some 79% of respondents said that full job portability and the lack of a vendor lock-in were critical to the success of their digital initiatives. 69% said that vendor lock-in was a major obstacle to improving business performance in most parts of their cloud assets.
Contrary to most claims, the companies surveyed do not appear to be particularly concerned about a skills shortage in cloud development and maintenance. 54% of them stated that managers are “not a significant obstacle” in the cloud sector, and 47% stated that the availability of “people with the right skills and experience” in the cloud sector is “not a significant obstacle.” “High levels of SaaS adoption may be making talent shortages less acute,” the authors say, meaning that the majority of backend and software work is now done by cloud providers.
In addition, 73% of respondents said that the cloud model is delivering “Improvements in product and service production,” with a further 72% satisfied with “improvements in software/digital product quality – which have reduced defects, and rework.”
78% of respondents said that the main advantage of cloud services is the ability to reduce dependencies between teams and software components; another 75% said they are making progress in “improving developer productivity by automating repetitive tasks,” and 71% say cloudification means “working with a high degree of psychological safety” – all of which are critical for developers working on high-visibility projects.