In 2015, cloud users leveraged more clouds than ever before. According to the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, companies using the cloud are averaging the management of 3 public and 3 private clouds. Who would have thought that 6 clouds would be the average? And why 6 and not 2 or 12?
It’s also interesting to note that the report further broke down the types of clouds environments that are run by Enterprises. Enterprises are running applications on 1.5 public and 1.7 private clouds and experimenting with 1.5 public and 1.3 private clouds.

6 Reasons for the Management of 6 Clouds:
- As large public cloud providers become more commoditized, more niche offerings are created that are better suited for specific applications, industries, etc.
- IT professionals with one cloud option are realizing that there are unexpected costs and inefficiencies with having only one cloud service provider.
- Increase in experimenting with different cloud types as businesses spend more money on migrating daily work processes outside of dev ops.
- Workload migration across clouds is easier but not yet seamless.
- There are still major challenges in expertise, cloud security, and compliance for Enterprises.
- Cost management of multiple clouds is difficult to optimize.