Druva, the leader in cloud data protection and management, today announced the results of its Druva 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey, centered on understanding how enterprises working in a VMware environment are approaching cloud migration.

The survey results show a powerful trend toward moving virtual workloads to the cloud in favor of its lower cost, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) being the preferred destination for workload migrations. Disaster recovery, workload mobility, and archival automation were all strong adoption drivers, with many organizations looking to save money and maximize IT initiatives focused on simplifying their infrastructure.

Key findings of the Druva 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey:

• There is a major shift in the VMware market to migrate data centers to the cloud. 90 percent of companies are aiming to migrate their workloads by 2018, with a clear preference for AWS (47 percent), followed by Microsoft Azure (25 percent).
• Data protection of virtual infrastructure is a key driver for cloud adoption. 82 percent of those surveyed cited disaster recovery as a critical reason to move to the cloud. While initially the IT community was skeptical about the cloud's robust security, these perceptions are changing as professionals understand how it reduces the possibility of costly downtime and promotes productivity.
• When disaster strikes: 81 percent believe DR for VMs is a core need. More than half of the respondents (54 percent) reported they wanted a single, central solution that would protect their data in either a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment. Regarding hybrid, 42 percent will have virtual infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud.
• SaaS-based solutions to the rescue: Enterprises want a single control plane for data protection. 73 percent of organizations feel a single control plane, offered as a service, is the preferred way to address protecting this new environment.
• Many are questioning their long-term loyalty to the VMware hypervisor platform, in favor of cloud. 63 percent of respondents expressed that they are considering alternate hypervisors. This figure demonstrates that there is growing desire to natively build applications in the cloud instead of replicating VMware environments on public cloud platforms.

"The shift toward moving virtual workloads to the cloud is not just about cost; it's an initiative that's seen as critical to IT and business needs," says Dave Packer, vice president product marketing, Druva. "Downtime and poor application performance can be devastating to productivity, and we see an insatiable appetite by business users for a SaaS-based approach to solving seamless connectivity, access, functionality, and cloud integration challenges."

Druva conducted its VMware cloud migration survey in July 2017 to better understand how people within the VMware ecosystem are approaching this initiative, what their timelines are for making the move, and what a VMware hybrid cloud environment will look like for them. This year's survey was completed by 443 VMware professionals from multiple industries around the globe.

Download the 2017 VMworld Cloud Migration Survey Summary paper and accompanying infographic for the full results.