Global Survey: Maturity of the Technology Spurs Cloud Adoption More than Business Drivers or Culture Change

Business goals are not enough to compel companies to move to the cloud-rather, it is the maturity, flexibility and reliability of cloud technology that are driving companies to increase and expand their adoption, according to the latest report released by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of a family of open source projects including Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, and Cloud Foundry BOSH. The report was announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018.

"As IT decision makers have experienced the impressive benefits of the cloud, they have broadened their adoption to more sophisticated technologies in the platform and application development layer of the stack, such as PaaS, containers and serverless," said Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. "We’re seeing a virtuous cycle, as comfortability with one technology results in lightning-speed adoption of more advanced technologies. In a decade, we can expect serverless to be as commonplace as PaaS."

Key findings include:

• Companies Are Putting Their Cloud Stake in the Ground: Compared to November 2017, there has been a 13 point increase in IT decision makers who report they’ve selected their cloud providers and are beginning to deploy more broadly.
• Cloud Is Consistent Across New and Legacy Apps: Forty-five percent of companies are doing at least some cloud-native app development, and 40 percent are doing some re-architecting/refactoring of their legacy apps.
• Boosted Integration of the Latest and Greatest: There is a 16 point increase year-on-year of IT decision makers who are experimenting and adopting the latest technology to build on top of existing cloud solutions.
• Big Increase in Familiarity with Cloud Technologies: Seventy-four percent of respondents can comfortably explain "PaaS" to a colleague, compared to just 63 percent who said they could in February 2016. Additionally, 49 percent can now explain "containers," an increase from just 24 percent.
• Awareness Directly Correlates With Adoption: As comfortability has increased, only 14 percent of respondents report they are not using or evaluating a PaaS, and only 13 percent said they are not using or evaluating containers.
• Containers Prove Their Scalability: In August 2016, 51 percent of respondents were deploying between 0 and 100 containers, and only 37 percent were deploying over 100; today, the numbers have practically flipped, with 47 percent deploying more than 100 containers and only 42 percent deploying less than 100.
• It’s Time to Focus on Culture: In February 2016, 15 percent more respondents said technology was a bigger obstacle to their application development productivity than culture. Today, 11 percent more respondents say culture is a bigger obstacle than technology, suggesting a commitment to culture change is necessary to realize the benefits of adoption.

A company’s shift to the cloud is often described as a "sudden leap," rather than the reality of a gradual journey. Cloud Foundry Foundation’s research from the past three years-including its most recent report in July 2018, "Where PaaS, Containers and Serverless Stand in a Multi-Platform World,"-show that companies are gradually shifting to an IT strategy that not only commits to the cloud but continually adopts innovative technologies such as PaaS, containers, serverless and more. The next year will present new challenges as companies further attempt to shift their culture to match their increased use of agile development and continuous deployment.

Companies’ increasing prioritization of interoperability and integration supported the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s investment in its newest projects, Eirini and CF Containerization, which were announced at Cloud Foundry’s October 2018 European Summit in Basel. The projects further enable integration between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, meeting developers’ need for the simple, agile and flexible delivery of software packaged into containers. For a more detailed explanation of the different interoperable possibilities, watch the video.