According to a study from 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), multi-cloud is the new reality in enterprise technology. 

The global study collected information from 1,500 executives and senior decision-makers at enterprises, including 30 from Australia, about how they use the cloud within their organisation. It found that almost every cloud journey is now becoming a multi-cloud journey.  

In recent years, the cloud has become nearly synonymous with IT as enterprises seek increased business agility and improved operational efficiency from their technology. While these trends have existed for some time, more than 93% of respondents agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic had been a strong driver of greater interest and investment in cloud technology. 

As organisations faced new challenges, such as increased remote work and collaboration with new business partners and suppliers, they adopted a multi-cloud strategy to gain the flexibility and scalability needed for this new reality.  

“The ‘one-stop-shop’ mentality has died when it comes to the cloud. Instead, multi-cloud is the reality of enterprise technology environments as these organisations seek to get the right mix of solutions and capabilities they need to operate effectively,” says Melanie Posey, research director of cloud and managed services transformation at 451 Research. 

“Multi-cloud is here to stay, and enterprises are choosing this model for the benefits it provides for a range of different business and operational requirements, like business agility or access to best-of-breed technology.”

The study has also reported several other interesting observations for enterprises in Australia. 

93% of Australian enterprises surveyed are using or plan to use at least two cloud infrastructure providers, and 30% are using four or more. 

Interestingly, in Australia, more enterprises use anything between four and 10 cloud infrastructure providers than a single provider.

86% reported using or planning to use at least two cloud application providers (Software-as-a-Service), with 54% using cloud applications from five or more providers. This multi-cloud strategy allows IT departments to meet the specific technology needs of different teams across the organisation.

The study noted disaster recovery and cost optimisation drive demand for multi-cloud strategies in Australia. Globally, enterprises' top two drivers of multi-cloud strategies are data sovereignty (41%) and cost optimisation (40%).

Australian enterprises are more motivated by redundancy/disaster recovery than any other market polled, with 32% of respondents citing it as the number one factor compared to just 21% globally.

Australian organisations also cited cost optimisation and business unit/functional role preferences as the most significant drivers for multi-cloud adoption, with 29% citing them as key motivators.

In Australia, other drivers of multi-cloud strategies include regulatory compliance (25%), data sovereignty/cloud locality (25%) and best-of-breed cloud services and applications (25%).

Multi-cloud strategies give enterprises more control over where and how their data is stored and used, while also ensuring businesses can control the costs of their cloud operations by adjusting which services they use from different providers.

The study found enterprise organisations are proactively planning multi-cloud strategies for the future.

Cost optimisation across different public cloud environments (46%) and geographic expansion is the most anticipated future use cases for multi-cloud in Australia, followed by data redundancy (39%)

IT departments also plan to use multi-cloud strategies to support developer preferences (32%) and workload/data mobility (29%). The fact that IT departments are planning a multi-cloud strategy shows that they see multi-cloud as a way to get ahead of their technology needs, instead of simply a tactic to react to crises.

The study states employee productivity functions and data processing among the top cloud workloads.

The top workloads Australian enterprises host with their primary IaaS/PaaS provider include employee productivity functions (57%), data processing, analytics and business intelligence (54%), and enterprise resource planning (46%). Customer-facing functions came in fourth at 39%.

In Australia, the top types of workloads currently hosted with secondary IaaS/PaaS public cloud providers were high-performance applications requiring low latency (50%), ERP (50%) and employee productivity functions (39%).

Design, management or enablement of DevOps tools and practices (43%), optimisation of cloud infrastructure/deployment for cost or performance (39%) and management of containers or container management systems deployed in the cloud (32%) were among the top types of third-party services Australian organisations use to support their cloud strategy and management needs.

“Multi-cloud is here, whether enterprises are ready for it or not. Business mergers can turn even the most stable of IT strategies into a multi-cloud environment overnight,” says Carlos Cienfuegos, vice president of Oracle Cloud ANZ. 

“Whether IT teams are starting their multi-cloud plans from scratch or already have an implementation in place but want to add best-of-breed cloud services, OCI’s distributed cloud can help. With the recent introduction of MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, customers have even more capabilities to help their multi-cloud strategies succeed.”

This research validates the approach OCI has taken with its distributed cloud and management offerings, which earned Oracle recognition as a leader in the recent Omdia Universe: Hybrid and Multicloud Management Solution, 2022–23 report (December 2022).

OCI's distributed cloud offers customers the benefits of the cloud with greater control over data residency, locality, and authority, even across multiple clouds. 

OCI's distributed cloud features OCI's multicloud capabilities, such as Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure and MySQL HeatWave give customers a choice to pick the best cloud provider for their applications and databases.

OCI also delivers hybrid cloud services on-premises via Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and manages infrastructure in over 60 countries. 

OCI operates 41 OCI regions in 22 countries, with nine more planned, including two sovereign cloud regions for the EU.

Importantly, OCI delivers dedicated regions for customers to run all Oracle cloud services in their own data centres. In addition, Oracle Alloy will enable partners to customise the cloud services and experience for their customers.