A new survey has found that 93% of the IT industry will adopt cloud technology within five years.

The survey, conducted by Hornetsecurity, shows that hybrid cloud solutions are the long-term target for two in three companies. The hybrid cloud adoption survey of more than 900 IT professionals, primarily based in North America and Europe, found that most businesses (93%) are adopting a hybrid of cloud and on-premise solutions or migrating fully to the cloud within five years.

Half of the respondents say they will be mostly in the cloud in five years, with one or two workloads remaining on-premise. While 28% of respondents reported they would remain primarily on-premise, with a workload or two in the cloud.

Hybrid cloud solution as a permanent destination

While 29% of respondents say they use hybrid cloud solutions as a stepping stone to a full cloud environment, 67% of respondents see hybrid as a final destination for their infrastructure due to workloads that need to remain on-premise. The rest say they will be remaining 100% on-premise.

When asked why companies remained on-premise, many respondents cited data control, security, and cost concerns with cloud technology.

Trust issues with cloud as a reason for workloads remaining on-premise

The survey also shows that trust issues with the public cloud are present within companies of all sizes, with 31 to 36% of all company size categories reporting concerns.

The survey also shows that experience brings more distrust in the public cloud. Respondents with over 20 years of experience were more likely to express concerns with the trustworthiness of cloud platforms (34%) than those with one to five years of experience (24%). Half of all respondents identify legacy systems or software as another significant reason certain workloads must remain on-premise. Application compatibility was reported as a roadblock to cloud migration for four in ten companies.
Industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CMMC were also cited as an obstacle for cloud adoption by 29% of respondents.

Multiple challenges blocking cloud adoption

Some reasons companies gave for holding back from full cloud migration include a lack of technical know-how or certified staff (48%), difficulties with the application of best practices within the company (33%), issues with connectivity (33%), and secured access (29%).

The most common workload preventing IT departments from lifting all services to the cloud was print and imaging services (55%). While databases (50%), file storage (45%) and application services (43%) are also cited as reasons for remaining partially on-premise.

The Hornetsecurity survey reveals that hybrid cloud solutions still bring several challenges. The largest among them is monitoring and security, with half of the respondents expressing concerns in this area. Networking and connectivity is also a concern shared by nearly half of the respondents (48%). Training and certification (35%), manageability and tooling (35%), resiliency and data recovery (33%) are also concerns.