The Cloud in 2021: Adoption Continues

Chapter 1. The Cloud in 2021: Adoption Continues

Last year, our report on cloud adoption showed that companies were moving quickly to adopt the cloud: 88% of our respondents from January 2020 said that they used the cloud, and about 25% said that their companies planned to move all of their applications to the cloud in the coming year.

This year, we wanted to see whether that trend continued, so we ran another online survey from July 26, 2021, to August 4, 2021. Since the 2020 survey was taken when the pandemic was looming but hadn’t yet taken hold, we were also curious about how the lockdown affected cloud adoption. The short answer is “not much”; we saw surprisingly few changes between January 2020 and July 2021. Cloud adoption was proceeding rapidly; that’s still the case.

Executive Summary

• Roughly 90% of the respondents indicated that their organizations are using the cloud. That’s a small increase over last year’s 88%.

• The response to the survey was global; all continents (save Antarctica) were represented. Compared to last year, there was a much higher percentage of respondents from Europe (33%, as opposed to 11%) and a lower percentage from North America (42%).

• In every industry, at least 75% of the respondents work for organizations using the cloud. The most proactive industries are retail & ecommerce, finance & banking, and software.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) (62%), Microsoft Azure (48%), and Google Cloud (33%) are still the big three, though Amazon’s market ...