Organizations that embrace more sophisticated, multicloud environments that leverage new technology trends such as DevOps and application containers will benefit from greater agility, lower costs and faster time to market, says a new report.

The report, from digital performance monitoring and management firm New Relic Inc., lumps organizations into three categories based on their responses to survey questions: traditional data center users, static cloud users and “dynamic” cloud users.

New Relic defines dynamic cloud users as those that are “exploiting the cloud in a dynamic way, automatically allocating and de-allocating resources on the fly for maximum agility to deal with spikes in demand and accelerate time to market.”

Unsurprisingly, the report found that dynamic cloud users are 23 percent more likely than other firms to be using emerging technologies such as containers, container orchestration and “function as a Service.”

The report also notes big differences in where dynamic and static cloud users tend to house their information technology workloads. Dynamic cloud users overwhelmingly favor the multicloud approach, with 80 percent splitting their resources among several public clouds and private data centers. In contrast, only a handful of static cloud users do the same.

All of this adds up to serious benefits, New Relic reckons. Its research shows that dynamic cloud users will see serious improvements in application uptime, as much as 26 percent, compared with 19 percent for static cloud users. Dynamic cloud users will also benefit from operating cost savings of 21 percent on average, compared with savings of just 9 percent for static cloud users.

New Relic also provided some guidance for companies that wish to become dynamic cloud users. In its report, it said such organizations only use the resources they need, which means regularly allocating or de-allocating resources on the fly, and using resource allocation as a central aspect of their application architecture. New Relic also highlighted the importance of using multiple cloud vendors, saying that 68 percent of dynamic cloud firms use three or more providers.

“To take advantage of many of the most important benefits of cloud computing, you need to do more than simply move all or part of your application to cloud-based servers in a simple migration,” New Relic noted in the report. “And while maintaining some of your applications in the cloud and some of them in your own data centers can be an effective part of a migration strategy, it is not a long-term solution to maximize the benefits of the cloud.”

New Relic said it gathered more than 500 responses from organizations in France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. in its survey, which can be downloaded for free here.

Image: New Relic