Canonical Survey Highlights Private Cloud Popularity

Private and hybrid clouds are increasing in popularity as security and data privacy concerns limit continued adoption of public clouds. That’s the headline conclusion from Canonical‘s sixth Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey, the results of which it released today. Read on for details.

First things first, though: Before delving into Canonical’s data, it’s worth observing that the 3,000 respondents to the survey “were mostly Ubuntu server and cloud users,” according to the company. So this isn’t exactly a representative sample of all cloud users, just those that deploy Ubuntu—and even there, it’s not clear whether all segments of the Ubuntu cloud and server community were represented equally in the survey.

Still, as Canonical noted, Ubuntu is one of the leading cloud platforms, and the survey is useful for providing some sense of current trends in the cloud, especially within the open source space.

The most significant finding was that “cloud adoption remains heavily weighted to private clouds,” which account for 35 percent of adoptions, Canonical noted. That trend comes at the expense of public clouds, which represented only 23 percent of cloud adoptions, according to the survey, down from 27 percent last year.

Hybrid clouds account for some of the decline in public cloud adoption, too. Hybrids represented 20 pecent of adoptions in this year’s survey, an increase from 15 percent last year.

Canonical suggests that the decline in public clouds’ popularity is the result of their “not fully addressing security and compliance issues that enterprises have when thinking about moving their critical workloads to the cloud.” Thirty-four percent of the survey respondents said security and data privacy concerns are major barriers to public cloud adoption. Moreover, the most popular public clouds are Google Cloud and HP Cloud, according to the survey, a fact Canonical attributes to their being “more open, flexible and secure public cloud platform.”

The full survey results are available on Canonical’s blog.