For a long time, Microsoft has been touting hybrid cloud, or a mix of on-premises and public-cloud services.
And in the past year, both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud have followed suit, making major announcements involving hybrid cloud. Companies often choose to keep some of their work on data centers because of regulations, especially in industries such as health or finance, and analysts say this will not change anytime soon.
Indeed, 58% of companies with more than 1,000 employees are now pursuing a hybrid-cloud strategy, up from 51% last year, Flexera's RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report said.
What's more, 84% of those companies have a multi-cloud strategy, which means that they store workloads on multiple public clouds, hybrid clouds, or data centers. This rose from 81% last year.
Microsoft launched its hybrid cloud, Azure Stack, in 2017, and Microsoft is the only company out of the top three cloud providers that has a generally available hybrid cloud.
Last November, Amazon announced a hybrid-cloud offering called AWS Outposts, and it will be available later this year. And in February, Google Cloud announced it will make its hybrid-cloud offering, Cloud Services Platform, available as a beta for customers, a move that company officials say is a part of its strategy to attract more enterprise customers.
In addition, IBM is betting on its upcoming acquisition of Red Hat to help it become a top hybrid-cloud player.
Now, 45% of enterprises cite either hybrid cloud or a balanced approach, which uses public clouds and data centers, as a top priority in their cloud strategies, the survey found. In comparison, 31% of enterprises see public cloud as their biggest focus.
The Flexera RightScale survey polled 786 respondents. Fifty-eight percent of respondents were large corporations with 1,000-plus employees, and 42% were small businesses.
