It’s now much easier for enterprises to take a multicloud approach, which offers such benefits as avoiding vendor lock-in and competitive pricing, to name a few. Has managing multiple cloud providers become the new default for enterprise computing? A TechRepublic Premium online survey wanted to find out.

The survey asked the following questions:

• Does your company use a multicloud deployment?

• What public cloud platforms does your organization currently use?

• What functions do you use cloud (application providers) for?

• What are the benefits to taking a multicloud approach?

• What public cloud platforms does your organization currently use?

• What are the biggest challenges to managing multiple cloud providers?

More than two thirds of survey respondents currently use, or plan to use, services from multiple cloud vendors. Of the available public cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were the most popular choice for survey respondents, at 78% and 77% respectively. Forty-three percent of survey respondents use Google Cloud Platform, and 23% of respondents use Oracle Cloud. A smaller amount of respondents cited IBM Cloud (13%) and Alibaba Cloud (12%) as their cloud provider of choice. Only 5% of respondents enlist the services of Tencent Cloud and Fijitsu Cloud Services.

While avoiding vendor lock-in dominated the list of potential benefits for taking a multicloud approach according to 73% of survey respondents, competitive pricing came in second place for 65% of survey respondents. Resistance to outages, ease of scaling to workloads, and regulatory compliance rounded out the list of multicloud benefits for survey respondents.

However, despite the many potential benefits of multicloud, respondents did cite several challenges of managing multiple cloud providers. A resounding 72% of respondents cited complexity as their biggest challenge, while both migrating applications and security was a challenge for 48% of respondents. In addition, managing costs was listed as a challenge for 43% of respondents.

To read all of the survey results, plus analysis, download the full report here: Managing the Multicloud: Companies capitalize on using multiple cloud providers.

This report contains all the data, plus analysis, from the survey. For details on future TechRepublic Premium surveys, follow us on Facebook, Twitter,or LinkedIn.