Approximately 96 percent of enterprise-sized organizations use the cloud in one way or another. Perhaps they want to leave the hassles of IT and maintenance to an outside party so they can focus on their core business. Maybe it’s an easier way for them to store their critical data. No matter the reason, cloud computing offers a wide array of benefits.

If you’re looking to grow your internal cloud team or transform the way your enterprise organization utilizes cloud computing and want data to help promote that cause, we have the numbers you need. In most of our blogs, we outline trends, challenges, and opportunities in cloud computing and how they affect you. This time, we’re combining statistics on cloud computing from a variety of resources into one place.

Strength in Numbers

There are a number of reasons why enterprise-sized organizations are switching to all-cloud or hybrid cloud environments: Cost control, scalability, easier infrastructure management, reliable alternative for back-up and disaster recovery…the list goes on. Though the reasons are varied, the overall effect is a wholesale shift to the cloud across industries:

• Public cloud adoption is 91 percent, and the use of private clouds is as high as 72 percent.
• Enterprise organizations run77 percent of their workloads in the cloud. The same number has at least one application or a portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud.
• Approximately 85 percent of enterprise-sized organizations keep sensitive data in the cloud.
• Public cloud market spending in the United States is expected to reach $124.6 billion by the end of 2019, making it the largest yearly amount spent to date.
• Digital transformation is the leading factor driving public cloud engagement.
• The percentage of enterprise organizations with a hybrid cloud strategy grew from 51 percent in 2018 to 28 percent this year.
• Almost 75 percent of technology CFOs say cloud computing had the most measurable impact on their business in 2017.

You may be asking yourself the reason for this rapid growth. A survey of AWS re: Invent attendees performed by LogicMonitor, a SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for enterprise IT and service providers, found that the top trends and factors driving public cloud engagement are digital transformations, IT agility, DevOps, mobility, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and IoT. A similar survey, this one polling more than 700 business technology buyers across North America and Europe, cited these additional reasons enterprise-sized organizations want to invest in the cloud:

• Access to data anywhere (42 percent)
• Enhanced disaster recovery capabilities (38 percent)
• Better flexibility (37 percent)
• Reduction of the support burden on IT staff (36 percent)

Multi-Cloud Adoption

Many enterprise organizations, especially those not new to the cloud market, employ a multi-cloud strategy. That’s because it offers increased reliability, flexibility, and security; enhanced control; and enhanced risk management, and diversified data management, among other things. So how prevalent is multi-cloud adoption? Let’s take a look:

• Approximately 84 percent of enterprise-sized organizations have a multi-cloud environment.
• Enterprise organizations use, on average, five clouds.
• More than 62 percent of public cloud adopters are using more than two unique cloud environments. Most utilize an average of 7 public clouds.
• According to executives across different industries, the top two benefits of a multi-cloud strategy are increased cloud options (59 percent) and easier and faster disaster recovery (40 percent).

A Priority Investment

As these numbers indicate, investing in cloud computing is a priority for a lot of enterprise-sized organizations, no matter the industry. Gartner reports that more than a third of organizations see cloud investments as a top-three investing priority. Here are a couple of similar statistics from RightScale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera:

• Public cloud is the top priority for 31 percent of enterprise organizations, a figure that increased from 29 percent in 2017.
• Optimizing existing cloud use for cost savings is the top initiative in 2019, the third year in a row.

More and more enterprise-sized organizations are realizing the benefits of cloud computing, resulting in the continued growth of technology across multiple industries. They’re finding out they can easily store vast amounts of data, enjoy 24/7 support, and enable their IT professionals to focus on other business tasks. The following statistics make it clear that this technology isn’t going away any time soon:

• The global public cloud computing market is expected to reach $258 billion this year and $370 billion in 2023.
• About 83 percent of enterprise organizations’ workloads are predicted to be in the cloud by 2020.
• Cloud computing spending is expected to grow at better than six times the rate of IT spending through 2020.
• Almost 70 percent of enterprise infrastructure and the software will be for cloud-based offerings by 2020.
• More than 80 percent of enterprise-sized organizations’ workload will reside on the cloud by the end of 2020.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be the leading catalysts driving greater cloud computing adoption by 2020.
• Cloud data centers will process 94 percent of workloads in 2021.
• Approximately 98 percent of the more than 1,000 executives across 19 different industries surveyed by the IBM Institute for Business Value said they expect to leverage multiple cloud environments across their organization by 2021.

Whether you’re just starting out in cloud computing or are an experienced IT professional, our TRiA Cloud Management Platform offers comprehensive cloud governance to optimize spend, manage performance, and ensure continuous security and compliance. Request a demo today.