One small commissioned global survey has noted that respondents who felt trapped, need to be liberated from perceived cloud-vendor lock-in.

In September 2023, an online survey of 449 IT decision makers across North America, Europe, APAC, and Latin America was conducted to evaluate sentiments in the respondents’ IT and security ecosystems.

Three key highlights were noted in the data.

Firstly, respondents were generalized as losing control over their IT and security environments, based on the “nearly 40%” of respondents citing the sentiment. The top four factors cited as contributing to the overall loss of control were: an increase in the overall number of applications (66%); an increase in locations for applications (62%); the shift from on-premises infrastructure to cloud computing (54%); and the shift to remote/hybrid workforces (49%).

Secondly, 30% of respondents had noted that managing and securing both public cloud environments, and data in SaaS environments, was significantly more complex than ever before.

Thirdly, 96% of respondents cited the sentiment that today’s businesses would gain value from a connectivity cloud that provides “secure, performant, ‘any-to-any’ connectivity (i.e., connectivity between more people, apps, data, devices, networks, and clouds). “Nearly half” of respondents had cited the sentiment that this type of solution would accelerate digital transformation while reducing their corporate attack surface area. Also, 58% of respondents believed this solution would increase productivity, improving time to market (54%), and grow overall revenue (54%).

Matthew Prince, CEO, Cloudflare, which commissioned the small survey, opined that: “Today, the big clouds have built business models on capturing (customer) data, making it hard to move (that) data. These captivity clouds will lure (customers) in with one product, and make it near impossible to mix and match competitive offerings across the cloud space.”

Accordingly, the firm asserts that the findings underscore the (respondents’) need for a better way to connect anything that is online (whether they are hosted on a cloud, a device, a database, or on-premises hardware).