Fourth Phase (2021‑2022) Survey of Cloud‑Native Technology Adoption in Central State‑Owned Enterprises

In response to China’s 14th Five‑Year Plan and the "cloud‑native, data‑driven, intelligence" initiative, the Cloud‑Native Technology Practice Alliance (CNBPA) together with cloud‑native communities and vendors released the fourth‑phase (2021‑2022) Traditional Industry Cloud‑Native Technology Landing Survey – Central State‑Owned Enterprises edition, offering concrete references for the cloud‑native migration of central SOEs.

The survey, building on previous methodology, focused for the first time on central SOEs and gathered 306 valid questionnaires from IT practitioners in sectors such as industry, transportation, healthcare, education, retail and information technology.

Analysis of the rich data highlighted important trends in IT budget, application architecture, technology selection and transformation outcomes, aiming to help readers fully understand the current state and maturity of cloud‑native adoption in central SOEs.

Key Findings

Despite the pandemic, IT budgets in central SOEs have continued to rise; nearly 50% invest more than CNY 10 million annually, 9.8% allocate CNY 1‑10 billion, and 4.9% exceed CNY 10 billion each year.

Hybrid multi‑cloud and edge‑computing technologies are becoming mature and widely used. 65.68% of respondents are already using or considering multi‑cloud/hybrid cloud, and over 75% have migrated to the cloud (17.65% public cloud, 41.17% multi‑cloud, 16.67% planning multi‑cloud, 24.51% still mainly private).

Autonomous controllability presents new opportunities: more than 50% adopt a "one‑cloud multiple‑chip" and dual‑CPU architecture as a transition path, supporting a full‑stack cloud‑native stack that closely aligns with business needs.

Over 95% of surveyed central SOEs have considered or are using cloud‑native technologies such as containers, micro‑services and DevOps; roughly 80% already use them, with 32.71% having containerized workloads, 28.3% pursuing micro‑service architectures, and 18.87% implementing DevOps practices.

Other observations: application and system update cycles are accelerating, yet transformation remains cautious—66.66% update within six months, while 33.34% maintain longer cycles; stability and security remain top priorities.

The ultimate goal of cloud‑native transformation is to enable business innovation and value creation, driven by unified system architecture (23.59%), standardized business processes (18.35%) and autonomous application innovation (13.86%).

For a complete version of the research report, scan the QR code below or click the provided links.