The migration of virtual workloads to the cloud could point to significant trouble on the horizon for VMware.

According to Druva’s 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey, which seeks to understand how enterprises working in a VMware environment are approaching cloud migration, the vast majority of businesses are looking to migrate their data centres to the cloud.

The report found that 90% of companies are aiming to migrate their workloads by 2018, and Amazon Web Services will be the big winner, with 47% having a preference for it ahead of Microsoft Azure on 25%.

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One of the key drivers of the cloud migration is the data protection of virtual

infrastructure. The report found that 82% cited disaster recovery as a critical reason to move to the cloud.

It was also found that 81% believe disaster recovery for virtual machines to be a core need, with the report stating that 54% wanted a single, central solution that would protect their data in either a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment.

Druva also revealed that 42% would have a virtual infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud.

Unfortunately for VMware, Druva found that many VMware hypervisor platform users are questioning their long-term loyalty. The majority of respondents (63%) said that they are considering alternative hypervisors, with the report saying: “This figure demonstrates that there is a growing desire to natively build applications in the cloud instead of replacing VMware environments on public cloud platforms.”

There’s also a high-demand for a single control plane for data protection, with 73% of organisations feeling that this, offered as a service, would be the preferred way to protecting this environment.

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“The shift toward moving virtual workloads to the cloud is not just about cost; it’s an initiative that’s seen as critical to IT and business needs,” says Dave Packer, VP product marketing, Druva.

“Downtime and poor application performance can be devastating to productivity, and we see an insatiable appetite by business users for a SaaS-based approach to solving seamless connectivity, access, functionality, and cloud integration challenges.”

The survey was completed by 443 VMware professionals from multiple industries around the world.