Our survey made it clear that multi-cloud is no longer merely an aspirational goal but an everyday reality for the vast majority of respondents. More than three quarters of respondents said they were already using more than one cloud, and 86% said they expected to be doing so in two years.

In our survey, digital transformation was the top factor driving multi-cloud adoption, but it was ranked in the top three by only a third (34%) of respondents and followed closely by avoiding vendor lock-in (30%), cost reduction (28%), and scaling (25%).

The 2020 IDC report, meanwhile, suggested that multi-cloud helps enterprises achieve “better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security, and greater compliance with regulations.”

The Accelerate DevOps report found similar fragmentation. Leveraging the unique benefits of each provider was the most commonly named reason for using multiple cloud providers, but was chosen by only about a quarter (26%) of respondents (respondents were allowed to select only one). According to that report, this suggests that when respondents select an additional provider, they look for differentiation between their current provider and alternatives. The second most common reason for moving to multi-cloud was availability (22%). Unsurprisingly, respondents who have adopted multiple cloud providers were “1.5 times more likely to meet or exceed their reliability targets.”

Money always matters, and that’s certainly true in the cloud, where there’s increasingly big money at stake. According to the HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy survey, more than 15% of respondents budgeted at least $10 million on their multi-cloud initiatives, and that figure ballooned to 34% of large enterprises. (Six percent of respondents budgeted $50 million or more.)

And in 2020, the IDC report suggested that respondents devote an average of $73.8 million — almost a third (32%) of their IT budget — to the cloud.

Of course, managing cloud spend is just as important as the actual numbers, and almost 40% of respondents to the HashiCorp survey ended up busting their cloud budget, spending more on the cloud than they planned. Surprisingly, bigger budgets seemed to lead to even more spending: 46% of companies budgeting $2 million to $10 million on cloud overspent, compared to just 27% of companies budgeting less than $100,000. Reasons for the overspending range from shifting priorities to COVID-19 to poorly managed resources.

Other surveys found similar results. In the Flexera survey, for example, 36% of enterprises said they spent more than $12 million on the cloud, while 83% spent more than $1.2 million. That’s up significantly from last year, when 20% of enterprises said they spent more than $12 million, and 74% spent more than $1.2 million.

One theme that emerged from the HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy survey is that many organizations are struggling to develop the in-house skill sets they need to manage a robust cloud infrastructure. That was cited as a top-three multi-cloud challenge by 57% of respondents, and a top-three cloud inhibitor by 41% of respondents. The problem was especially acute in the public sector (53%) and consumer goods/retail companies (51%).

It’s tempting to blame companies scrambling to cope with the effects of the global pandemic for turbocharging the adoption of multi-cloud architectures. But while that’s clearly a factor, the situation is a bit more complicated. While more than half (54%) of HashiCorp survey respondents said that COVID had accelerated their cloud and multi-cloud adoption, most of them called the impact low or moderate.

Other surveys also showed pronounced pandemic effects, Almost half (47%) of global respondents to the Equinix survey said COVID had accelerated their digital transformation plans as a result of COVID-19. And 9 out of 10 respondents to the Flexera survey said COVID led to cloud usage “slightly higher than planned” (61%) or “significantly higher than planned” (29%).