Platform9 Cloud-Native Research Reveals Operational Complexity and Security Among Top Concerns for 91% of Respondents

Platform9 announced the results of its inaugural “2022 Enterprise Trends in Cloud Native” research, revealing that 91% of survey respondents cite security, consistent management across environments, high availability, and observability as their top concerns for operating cloud-native technologies. The research also found that despite fast growing public-cloud deployments, 67% of cloud deployments are distributed, spread out across on-premises, hybrid, and edge clouds. 

The report, which surveyed over 500 technology executives and practitioners, details how enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies, provides insight into 2022 technology investment priorities, and identifies top concerns to help business leaders and enterprises determine how best to navigate and accelerate their cloud-native initiatives for the rest of the year.

Specific findings include:

• Kubernetes dominates container management: App containerization is accelerating, with 53% of respondents planning to containerize their current applications. Nearly 85% of respondents are using Kubernetes or have plans to deploy it in the next six months.
• Cloud-native hiring continues to be a priority: DevOps, cloud platform engineering, cloud-native developers, and security are the top hiring investments for 2022. 
• Executives across the board are looking for practical solutions to reduce vendor lock-in: While 61% of respondents have high or moderate concern about vendor lock-in, 71% of advanced users with larger deployments are even more concerned than early users. Additionally, managers, executives, and architects show higher level of concerns than engineers (65%). Plans for multiple cloud deployment lead as the number one action to address cloud lock-in, followed by using open-source services (#2) and writing portable apps (#3).
• While security and operations concerned 91% of respondents, executives were more concerned about cost optimization, data management, and high availability while practitioner’s challenges were more around day-2 operations such as upgrades, consistent management, observability, and troubleshooting.

“As more and more enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies, we see a corresponding growth of the deployment of distributed infrastructure across public, hybrid, and edge clouds,” said Bhaskar Gorti, CEO of Platform9. “What many fail to anticipate when implementing a distributed cloud strategy, are the challenges that come with managing it efficiently, and the high skill-level needed to do so. It’s critical that leaders prioritize a cloud-agnostic provider in order to achieve their goals faster and with less complexity, while minimizing the vendor lock-in concerns identified in the research.”

“Platform9’s research concretely reflects concerns we have heard from enterprise and service provider users adopting container and cloud-native platforms,” said Roy Chua, founder and principal at AvidThink. “Now that we are a few years into mainstream use of containers, leading users are reflecting their learnings and concerns across strategic, scaling, and operational elements of container and cloud services. The insights provided in the research make it required reading for enterprise IT leaders regardless of whether they are novices or seasoned experts in cloud transformation.”

“We’ve seen that there is a high-level of concern among enterprises when it comes to consistent management across clusters, uptime and SLA, cost optimization, and troubleshooting, yet there is a major gap in knowing how to actually solve for these challenges,” said Madhura Maskasky, VP of product at Platform9. “Hearing from various industry experts on the emerging cloud-native solutions available to address these issues will enable these companies to gain a comprehensive understanding of operating their deployments effectively, especially at distributed scale.”To access the complete “2022 Enterprise Trends in Cloud Native” research, click here.