• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 13, 2022

Email teams are at the mercy of their firms’ cloud policies.

The decision on which model to adopt is usually made by information technology (IT), and email per se ranks near the bottom of the use cases -- although data management is near the top, judging by the Denodo Global Cloud Survey Report 2022. 

Who makes decisions about cloud adoption? IT plays the following role(s):  

• IT is being trained to support cloud needs — 31.225%
• Select cloud provider and plan for cloud — 25.00% 
• IT acting as a cloud broker — 15.18%
• Looking for software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based services — 13.39%
• Cloud center of excellence (CoE) to support cloud projects — 13.39%
• Other — 1.79% 

Where does this leave marketing and other units? They are getting better at operating in the cloud.  

Of the firms surveyed, 19.59% are advanced, meaning they have multiple applications in production. This is an advance over the 15.48% recorded last year.  

Similar progress has been made on the less mature stages — 16.22% now call themselves watchers (down from 18.25% in 2021), and 29.05% see themselves as beginners, using cloud services for some development or testing (down from 39.95%). And intermediate users now make up 29.05% (down from 31.35%).  

The key barriers to cloud adoption and success are:

• Security, compliance and governance — 72.32% 
• Limited skills in managing cloud — 61.61%
• Budget and cost limitations—56.25%
• Integration of cloud with   on-premises data and apps — 49.11%
• Need executive management sponsor — 33.04% 
• Cloud performance and reliability — 23.21% 
• Other — 4.46% 

Meanwhile, 37.50% of the respondents have adopted a hybrid model, roughly flat with the 37.12% reported in 2021. 

In contrast, only 16.07% are using a private cloud -- down from 24.24% last year -- while 19.64% are relying on the public cloud (up from 15.91%) and 17.26% are utilizing a multi-cloud approach (versus 13.13%.

What are they using the cloud for? The top cloud initiatives are:

• SaaS adoption — 49.11%
• Data warehouse and data lakes — 48.21% 
• Advanced analytics and BI — 35.71%
• Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) containers adoption — 35.71% 
• PaaS adoption — 34.82% 
• Data science using AI/ML applications — 28.57%
• Cloud databases — 22.3%
• Serverless computing — 16.07% 
• Replace on-premises applications with SaaS—15.18% 
• Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) adoption — 12.50%
• Other — 1.79%

The primary cloud providers are:

• AWS (Amazon Web Services — 44.64% (up from 28.79%)
• Microsoft Azure — 26.19% (down from 36.36%) 
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — 11.31% (down from 16.67%)
• Other — 11.31% (up from 9.85%) 
• Alibaba Cloud — 3.57% (up from 0.76%) 
• Oracle Cloud — 2.98% (down from 3.03%) 
• IBM Cloud — 1.79% (down from 4.55%) 
• Tencent — 1.19% 

Denodo surveyed stakeholders at 150 organizations across North America, EMEA and APAC in March 2022.

The industries represented include software/IT, financial services, healthcare and numerous other sectors.