Druva today announced the results of its 2018 State of Virtualization in the Cloud survey to understand how enterprises working in virtual environments are approaching cloud migration. The results show cloud adoption is growing for virtualized workloads, with 90 percent of respondents running, or planning to run, virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud in 2018. The survey also highlights significant risk associated with this journey, as organizations discover that on-premises approaches to data management are outdated and no longer adequate for the cloud era. 

The annual survey polled IT and virtualization professionals across companies of all sizes to identify adoption and user data trends across cloud virtualized environments. Key findings from the survey include: 

• 41% of organizations are currently running VMs in the cloud, up from 31% in 2017
• 90% of respondents are running, or have plans to run, VMs in the cloud in 2018
• 59% of these organizations are planning to use AWS for these workloads
• 54% of respondents have no visibility into how and if data management policies are being applied and enforced
• 55% do not have a plan to centralize protection of their data across multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments, resulting in data silos
  

The result is a critical gap in visibility into data in the cloud, which can increase risk to data infractions and compliance--such as not purging data in time, per retention and compliance regulations. 

"What we're seeing from the results is that the momentum of cloud adoption continues to grow for virtualized workloads, but that journey isn't without challenges," said Dave Packer, VP of Products and Alliances, Druva. "The cloud forces organizations--and vendors--to be more disciplined in how they approach consumption of cloud resources. While the benefits of moving to the cloud are huge, the visibility and data management requirements are higher to ensure organizations realize cost savings, which is why more than 53% of respondents are still struggling to hit that target." 

The study also found that motivations behind the cloud journey are not entirely cost-driven. Only one in five participants in the survey stated that cost was the most significant reason to move to the cloud. "Ease of management" and the leveraging the cloud as "part of a critical IT initiative", both topped the list of significant drivers this year. 

"No matter where a business falls in its journey to the cloud, one thing is clear: understanding the role the cloud can play within virtual environments has become an integral part of most IT initiatives," said Steven Hill, Senior Analyst, Storage Technologies, 451 Research. "Companies that employ a hybrid strategy should look to the cloud as a flexible extension of their on-premises infrastructure where the challenge often lies in making movements to and from the cloud both seamless and reliable." 

Download the 2018 VMworld Cloud Migration Survey Summary paper and accompanying infographic for the full results.