57% of respondents verified that cloud-native workloads make up at least 20% of applications in IaaS.

Cohesive Networks announced survey results that validate enterprises are increasing their use of hybrid cloud as a strategic business asset. The online poll, conducted by Virtual Strategy Magazine, collected responses from more 100 international IT professionals across industries. Key findings from the survey about network infrastructure, connectivity, and data security in the cloud include:

• Organizations are moving from on-premises and self-hosting toward shared environments. The hybrid cloud consists of distributing workloads across multiple providers, often Amazon AWS plus an alternative provider. Respondents spread their usage mainly across on-premises, AWS, and Azure; however, inertia is holding organizations back from building more cloud-native applications.

18% of organizations now have more than half of their workloads cloud-native.

• Cloud-native workloads are slowly gaining momentum. Today, 18% of organizations have more than half of workloads cloud-native. Large enterprises are waiting to adapt existing applications to cloud environments until the end of the useful life of existing data center equipment. Enterprises acknowledge the capital savings of cloud-based workloads, and use cloud IaaS for 64% of development, testing, and production.

• Enterprises are taking IaaS security into their own hands. More than half use additional, independent tools to protect data in shared environments because data security is still an overarching priority for all industries. 60% of respondents only “somewhat” trust security to their IaaS providers.

• The speed and lack of friction in the cloud allow more experimentation and flexibility. Cloud IaaS increases accessibility to resources for application development, testing (dev/test), and production workloads. In fact, more than 83% of respondents use the cloud for dev/test, production, and all three functions. With IaaS, cloud-based resources can quickly spin up or down to fit demand.

“To have confidence in the security of data in transit, developers need to protect it from point to point and have reasonable confidence in the tools and protocols they use to secure it,” said Patrick Kerpan, CEO and co-founder, Cohesive Networks.

Security services in the cloud environments operate under different conditions than on-premise services. When an application moves to the cloud, it is separated from the large security devices that sit between the outside world and the corporate networks.

Cloud providers understand encryption at rest and offer several tools for client-side encryption. Because of the availability and simplicity of this at-rest cloud encryption, 51% of respondents feel confident in their data security at rest in the cloud. Unlike encryption-at-rest, cloud providers cannot guarantee end-to-end encryption when data passes between cloud regions and over the public internet.

“The whole point of moving enterprise applications to the cloud is to slash capital expenses, increase agility, centralize information management, and scale businesses quickly," Kerpan added. “With our software-only virtual appliance, VNS3, IT teams have the option to build and control their own dynamic, cloud-based networks that can scale with their applications across any public or private cloud, while remaining secure.” 

Data Center Networks Are Still a Burden

More than 50% of respondents still manage their own data center networks. Managing individual data centers and networks is an artifact of legacy IT operations, and as resources reach the end of their life-cycles we will see a bigger shift in cloud adoption.

With network management growing more complex, automation has been the most important innovation for IT teams in the last decade. More than 48% acknowledged that configuring network endpoints, firewalls, and network devices burn up more than 60% of their IT team’s time.

The future will see a network simplicity movement, as more enterprises turn to cloud-native and software-defined devices.

Network configuration efficiency will be the next big advantage of the cloud for the 72% stuck managing multiple network devices to for connectivity. Managing multiple devices and different software interfaces can add unnecessary complexity for organizations looking to streamline operations.