The cloud strategy that Microsoft is leading and that Google and Amazon are betting on is growing, report says

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

• According to Flexera's RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report, the amount of large companies with a hybrid cloud strategy, or combining public clouds and data centers to store workloads, has risen from 51% to 58%.
• Microsoft is the leader in hybrid cloud, as it introduced its hybrid cloud Azure Stack in 2017.
• Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services have also announced hybrid cloud offerings in the past year.

For a long time, Microsoft has been touting hybrid cloud, or a mix of on-premises and public cloud services.

And in the past year, both Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud have followed suit, making major announcements around hybrid cloud. Companies often choose to keep some of their work on data centers due to regulations, especially in industries like health or finance, and analysts say this will not change anytime soon.

Indeed, 58% of companies with more than 1,000 employees are now pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 51% last year, Flexera's RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report says.

What's more, 84% of those companies have a multi-cloud strategy, which means that they store workloads on multiple public clouds, hybrid clouds or data centers. This rose from 81% last year.

Microsoft launched its hybrid cloud Azure Stack in 2017, and currently, Microsoft is the only company out of the top three cloud providers that has a generally available hybrid cloud.

Last November, Amazon announced a hybrid cloud offering called AWS Outposts, and it will be available later this year. And in February, Google Cloud announced that it will make its hybrid cloud offering Cloud Services Platform available as a beta for customers, a move that company officials say is a part of its strategy to attract more enterprise customers.

Read more: Google Cloud's first major launch under new CEO Thomas Kurian is a tool to take on Amazon and Microsoft and win larger customers

In addition, IBM is betting on its upcoming acquisition of Red Hat to help it become a top hybrid cloud player.

Now, 45% of enterprises see hybrid cloud or a balanced approach being using public clouds and data centers as their top priority in their cloud strategy, the survey found. In comparison, 31% of enterprises see public cloud as their biggest focus.

The Flexera RightScale survey polled 786 respondents, 58% of which were large, 1,000+ employee corporations and 42% of which were small businesses.

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