Cisco’s 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report found that 82% of surveyed respondents said their organization had adopted hybrid cloud. The Cisco-sponsored 451 Research survey also identified security, operational complexity and cost management, and compliance and privacy as leading challenges. These are self-reported findings from 2022—not current adoption rates or an independent census of deployments.
What did the report measure?
Cisco commissioned 451 Research to survey cloud, DevOps, and networking professionals and IT decision-makers around the world. Cisco describes the survey as covering more than 2,500 professionals; the report PDF gives a base of 2,577 respondents for its findings. The available summary does not establish that every question had the same denominator, so the percentages below should be read in the context of each reported question and group.
The figures describe what respondents said about their organizations in 2022. They provide a snapshot of the surveyed population, not a verified count of all enterprises worldwide or a measure of adoption in 2026. Cisco’s report page and its May 25, 2022 blog post explain the survey context.
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How widespread was hybrid and multicloud adoption?
In the 2022 survey, 82% of respondents said their organization had adopted hybrid cloud. Cisco’s blog described this as adoption of a hybrid-cloud strategy with at least one public-cloud service for internal or customer-facing applications.
The report also indicated that public-cloud use often involved multiple providers: 92% of organizations used more than two public-cloud providers, while 8% used a single provider. These figures reflect the report’s survey findings and should not be treated as current market shares.
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What challenges did respondents identify?
Security was the most commonly named challenge among the highlighted results. Respondents also pointed to the work of managing more complex environments and controlling costs, as well as compliance and privacy.
| Challenge named | Respondents citing it |
|---|---|
| Security | 37% |
| Increased operational complexity and cost management | 33% |
| Compliance and privacy | 31% |
These are respondent-reported challenges, not measured incident rates or a ranking of all possible causes of hybrid-cloud difficulty.
How were teams changing their operating model?
The survey points to organizational responses as well as technology adoption. More than half of respondents said their organization had created a cross-functional team that included technical and business representation; half reported a centralized CloudOps and NetOps function.
- Cross-functional teams: 55% said their organization had created a team with technical and business representation.
- Centralized operations: 50% said their organization had a centralized CloudOps and NetOps function.
- Reported benefits of collaboration: respondents said collaboration between networking and cloud operations helped improve security (45%) and operational efficiency (41%).
The results suggest that respondents saw coordination between network and cloud operations as part of managing hybrid environments, rather than treating them as wholly separate domains.
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What practices and technologies were in use?
Workloads were not necessarily fixed in one environment. In the 2022 findings, 53% of organizations were moving workloads between on-premises and cloud environments weekly. Respondents also reported using automation and cloud-native approaches.
- Infrastructure as Code: 58% were adopting IaC.
- Cloud-native technologies for security: 44% were deploying them to improve their security posture.
- Emerging technologies: reported deployment included AIOps (45%), infrastructure automation (41%), and edge computing (41%).
These are reported adoption or deployment practices; the figures do not establish that the technologies produced a particular outcome for every organization.
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What did the report say about workloads and application development?
Respondents anticipated heterogeneous infrastructure across environments: 79% said more than half of their workloads would run on different hardware across environments. This is a reported expectation, not proof that those workloads later ran on different hardware.
Among DevOps and CloudOps respondents specifically, 91% said their organization had or would refactor applications using cloud-native technology. In that same role group, 47% said a “cloud first” mandate was the tipping point for changing development processes and tools. These figures apply to the named respondent groups, not necessarily to the full survey base.
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How should readers interpret the findings?
The report’s central message is that hybrid cloud was already common among its surveyed organizations in 2022, while operating across environments brought security, coordination, cost, and compliance concerns. The results also show respondents describing ongoing workload movement, cross-functional operations, and growing use of IaC and cloud-native methods.
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Because Cisco sponsored the survey and the results are self-reported, they are best used as historical context rather than an independent global benchmark. Comparisons with another cloud survey require matching the year, sponsor, research firm, respondent roles and regions, sample base, definitions of hybrid and multicloud, and whether a figure measures current practice or future expectation.
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