A 2023 multi-cloud report by Valtix found that 95% of companies are moving toward a multi-cloud environment. The survey also found that 58% believe they have the security architecture to support it. Respondents in the survey of over 200 U.S. IT leaders cited complexities, gaps and other challenges between the overall strategy and the infrastructure they ultimately create.

The survey found that multi-cloud activity continues to rise with 93% of respondents currently having workloads and data on more than one cloud. Of those not yet in a multi-cloud environment, 94% expect to be multi-cloud within 12 months. Companies are embracing multi-cloud twice as fast this year compared to last year when 62% of organizations were multi-cloud, with 84% expecting to get there within two years.

According to the survey, organizations cited several ‘unintentional’ factors that have accelerated their journey to a multi-cloud environment, including shadow IT (51%), different ISVs that support different clouds (48%) and mergers and acquisitions (47%).

Other findings include:

IT leaders surveyed were not hopeful cloud service providers (CSPs) will define portability standards anytime soon. A full 97% of IT leaders believe that CSPs should help define standards to enable better multi-cloud portability. However, 58% surveyed believe security standardization in a multi-cloud environment is a ‘myth’ and never achievable. Ninety-percent of organizations surveyed evaluate third-party security technology in addition to the security tools CSPs provide.

Managing multiple distinct security architectures with multi-cloud security is prohibitively expensive for 86% of organizations. Additionally, the cloud security architect is growing as a common role with 86% of organizations currently employing an in-house cloud security architect. Moreover, 89% of organizations require every cloud project to adhere to a cloud security reference architecture.

A copy of the full report can be downloaded here.