The cloud has been an integral part of business operations for a few years now, but mostly as a resource that was primarily utilized by startups and organizations demanding low-entry costs. These days, however, its use seems to have shifted towards established companies looking to revitalize and reinvent their current business strategies. A new survey on cloud adoption, released by Gigaom Research and North Bridge Venture Partners for the fourth consecutive year, has the stats to prove it.
The survey polled nearly 1,400 tech buyers, IT decision makers, and Gigaom Structure attendees on the business drivers, challenges and objectives behind their decisions to adopt cloud computing solutions. In addition to revealing that enterprises have adopted cloud computing at record rates, the survey also suggests that there is still plenty of room for growth as data and workload cloud migration roars on. Here are some of the findings we found most interesting:
Software, Infrastructure, and Platform as a Service (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) reign supreme: In this year’s survey, 72 percent of respondents reported having adopted SaaS, 56 percent adopted IaaS, and 41 percent adopted PaaS. Similarly, the surveyed tech buyers said they expect to double their usage of software-defined-networking (SDN) in two years.
New business benefits: The survey revealed that the cloud is no longer a tool for simply storing business applications and data. Nearly half of respondents indicated that the cloud supports their revenue generation and/or new product development. 45 percent also said they already, or are planning, to run their company from the cloud.
Hybrid cloud gains popularity: 42 percent of respondents already have a hybrid cloud implemented at their enterprises and 55 percent expect to have it in place within the next two years. Why the increase? Many organizations are moving away from the private cloud, with usage dropping from 24 to 13 percent in two years. Overall, enterprises expect their hybrid cloud use will increase by 44 percent over five years.
Data, data, data: Over the next two years, two-thirds of survey respondents expect their data will reside in some form on the cloud.
At Markley Group, we’re excited to see enterprises adopt the cloud in such numbers, but this record adoption also has its pitfalls. In an effort to implement cloud solutions as quickly as possible, many organizations sacrifice on cost and performance, which are key aspects to a well-functioning cloud strategy.
Instead, we suggest taking the time to understand your company’s data and cloud storage requirements, implement multiple storage tiers to best optimize those requirements, and plan ahead to ensure the cloud storage solution (or solutions) you choose will support your organization as your data grows and storage requirements change.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch and one of our cloud experts would be happy to help you through the process – because if the recent Gigaom Research and North Bridge Venture Partners survey is any indication, your organization will be moving even more of its operations to the cloud in due time, if it hasn’t already!
