Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures have become the de-facto standard among organizations, with more than half (53 percent) embracing them as the most popular form of deployment. Surveying over 250 worldwide business executives and IT professionals from a diverse group of technical backgrounds, data virtualization leader Denodo's third annual cloud usage survey revealed that hybrid cloud configurations are the center of all cloud deployments at 42 percent, followed by public (18 percent) and private clouds (17 percent). The advantages of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud configurations according to respondents include the ability to diversify spend and skills, build resiliency, and cherry-pick features and capabilities depending on each cloud service provider's particular strengths, all while avoiding the dreaded vendor lock-in.

The use of container technologies increased by 50 percent year-over-year indicating a growing trend to use it for scalability and portability to the cloud. DevOps professionals continue to look to containerization for production, because it enables reproducibility and the ability to automate deployments. About 80 percent of the respondents are leveraging some type of container deployment, with Docker being the most popular (46 percent) followed by Kubernetes (40 percent) which is gaining steam, as is evident from the consistent support of all the key cloud providers.

A foundational metric for demonstrating cloud adoption maturity, more than three quarters (78 percent) of all respondents are running some kind of a workload in the cloud. Over the past year, there has been a positive reinforcement of cloud adoption with at least a 10 percent increase across beginners, intermediate, and advanced adopters. About 90 percent of those embracing cloud are selecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as their service providers, demonstrating the continued dominance of these front-runners. But users are not just lifting their on-premises applications and shifting them to either of or both of these clouds; more than a third (35 percent) said they would re-architect their applications for the best-fit cloud architecture.

For the most popular cloud initiative, analytics and BI came out at the top with two out of three (66 percent) participants claiming to use it for big data analytics projects. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each has its own specific strengths, but analytics surfaced as the top use case across all three of them. This use case was followed closely by both logical data warehouse (43 percent) and data science (41 percent) in the cloud.

When it comes to data formats, two thirds of the data being used is still in structured format (68 percent), while there is a vast pool of unstructured data that is growing in importance. Cloud object storage (47 percent) along with SaaS data (44 percent) are frequently used to maximize ease of computation and performance optimization.

Further, cloud marketplaces are growing at a phenomenal speed and are becoming more popular. Half (50 percent) of those surveyed are leveraging cloud marketplaces with utility/pay-as-you-go pricing being the most popular incentive (19 percent) followed by its self-service capability/ability to minimize IT dependency (13 percent). Avoiding a long-term commitment also played a role (6 percent).

"As data's center of gravity shifts to the cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures are becoming the basis of data management, but the challenge of integrating data in the cloud has almost doubled (43 percent)," said Ravi Shankar, SVP and CMO of Denodo. "Today, users are looking to simplify cloud data integration in a hybrid/multi-cloud environment without having to depend on heavy duty data migration or replication which may be why almost 50 percent of respondents said they are considering data virtualization as a key part of their cloud integration and migration strategy."