Enterprises increasingly deploy microservices-based, cloud native applications when developing new applications. Microservices address issues with application scalability, failure resistance, development speed, and build times for the dynamic cloud environment by breaking applications up into multiple smaller, discrete services, each concerned with a specific business function. Packaging microservices into containers is a growing strategy to decouple applications from proprietary infrastructure so that an error in one doesn't impact other containers or an entire host computer. Containers allow applications to run on any cloud platform, which eases application mobility across cloud environments.

As more and more enterprises adopt containers, Kubernetes has become the de facto container orchestration system. It abstracts away the complexity of container deployment operations and automates containerized application deployment, scaling, and management. For this reason nearly all (94%) of 5th Annual ECI respondents reported having deployed Kubernetes.

Because applications designed using microservices architectures involve many moving parts, underlying compute and storage infrastructure must be adequate to support replicating services across infrastructures and scalability to meet dynamic resource demand and utilization. This can be a challenge for many enterprises, especially when implementing at scale. Because of this, it's not surprising that storage (42%) and underlying infrastructure design (42%) were cited among the most pressing challenges respondents faced with deploying and managing their Kubernetes environments (Figure 6).

Similarly, migrating legacy applications to Kubernetes (40%) was understandably a significant issue, as it entails the core decision and investment mentioned earlier of rearchitecting primarily monolithic applications designed for three-tier data centers using an entirely different, microservices-based, development architecture.

Respondents, on average, cite cybersecurity as the top criterion they use to decide which IT infrastructure(s) to deploy. Notably, nearly all respondents (99%) report having moved one or more applications from one IT infrastructure to another in the past year, and the biggest driver behind the relocation, mentioned by 46% of respondents, was related to improving their organization's security posture.

There are a few primary ways that organizations are bolstering their defenses against ransomware and malware attacks, including updating security measures, introducing specific employee training, and increasing security testing protocols (Figure 10).

IT infrastructures are growing increasingly diverse. More than half of 5th Annual ECI respondents (60%) are running multiple environments, and they generally plan to continue doing so or further diversify their IT environments. Adoption of the hybrid multicloud model, which constitutes a private cloud on-premises or at the edge plus multiple public cloud platforms, is expected to more than triple in the coming three years, while the growth of most other models will remain flat or decline. At the same time, data is becoming a bigger driver behind IT decisions.

To optimize their IT environments and deliver on business goals, increasingly including sustainability and budgetary objectives, enterprises are challenged to simplify and integrate the mixed infrastructures for both their applications and data. Most enterprises are making progress in simplifying management, with most reporting some level of interoperability between their IT environments. However, unified visibility into where all data resides is still lacking. While 94% agree that having full visibility is important, only 40% of 5th Annual ECI respondents report having complete visibility into where their data resides, meaning 60% are still falling short.

And, of course, this has significant repercussions on enterprises' ability to set and enforce security policies consistently across clouds; not surprisingly, data security and related compliance, governance, and sovereignty issues remained top of mind this year across the respondent base.

In 2020 and 2021, we saw the strategic rise of IT for many enterprises, advancing their digital transformation and technology agendas. Organizations will continue to increase their reliance on technology solutions, such as Kubernetes container orchestration and cloud-agnostic management tools, that abstract the underlying differences among cloud platforms and automate certain functions. This generation of emerging tools cuts down on the complexities of diverse, highly dynamic environments that need to scale while easing enterprises' ability to move applications and data among infrastructures securely and efficiently as IT resource demands and variables change.