Survey displays accelerated cloud adoption

Cloud adoption has continued to rise in 2013, with 75 percent of those surveyed reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform – up from 67 percent last year. That growth is consistent with forecasts from GigaOM Research, which expects the total worldwide addressable market for cloud computing to reach $158.8B by 2014, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011.

“We are glad to have had the opportunity to collaborate with such prominent companies in the cloud ecosystem to gain more insight on how organisations are using new cloud technologies,” said Simon Aspinall, chief vertical markets, strategy, marketing at Virtustream. “As expected, the survey results show that more and more enterprises are relying on the cloud to meet business demands, as they are seeking comprehensive cloud solutions that highlight agility, scalability, compliance and security – while maintaining a cost-effective price tag.”

This year’s survey finds several important shifts in why and how cloud computing is being used, obstacles to adoption, where cloud decision-making resides within organisations, and how the vendor landscape is changing. Some highlights of this year’s survey results include:

Business is driving cloud adoption
· The fastest growth today is in IaaS, with usage rising from 35% to 45%, a 29% increase over the prior year.

Agility and scalability are the primary drivers for cloud adoption
· More than half of respondents cited business agility (54.5%) and scalability (54.3%) as the main drivers;
· Reliability (22.3%) and complexity (21%) were among the top inhibitors, reflecting real world obstacles to an “always-on” services infrastructure.

Challenges to IT present opportunity
· A majority of respondents (55%) expect hybrid or multi-cloud providers to emerge to challenge the current cloud ecosystem in the next 2-3 years;
· In five years, more than three-quarters (76%) of respondents expect hybrid clouds to be the core of their cloud strategies overtaking public and private clouds.

The more complex needs of enterprises have prompted the cloud industry to evolve rapidly and cloud providers are being pressed to deliver solutions that underscore the agility, security and cost-efficiencies large organisations are increasingly seeking. As an example, Virtustream, already well positioned to meet the needs of the enterprise with its enterprise class cloud solutions, developed xStream, a cloud management software for private, virtual private, public and hybrid clouds that delivers enterprise-grade security and compliance, multi-tenant efficiency, application performance SLAs and a consumption-based pricing model.

“Clearly, even in the 3rd year of our survey, we're still very early in the cloud-computing revolution,” said Michael Skok, general partner, North Bridge Venture Partners. “Yet the cloud formations we identified in last year’s survey are clearly on an unstoppable rise. Self-empowered consumers and businesses are taking the lead, and in many instances, regardless of IT. But IT is investing heavily both adapting internal infrastructure and adopting public infrastructure to respond on demand while managing the inevitable issues of compliance and regulation through hybrid approaches. And to realise the promise of the cloud, there is a clear call for the industry as a whole to help reduce complexity, and provide better interoperability.”
Describing a vision of Bring Your Own Cloud services (BYOC) and the new reality of what Skok calls “Boundary-less” computing and “Out-servicing.”

He continued: “Cloud services are being adopted and used in a “boundary-less” way where users are seamlessly integrating them at home and work across all their devices. And in an increasingly mobile pattern of business today companies are compelled to accept and adopt this BYOC model. In fact businesses themselves are adopting the boundary-less approach as they look to disintermediate and squeeze money from their value chains, focus on their core competencies and “out-service” (outsource non-core services) via the cloud. With all this in mind they are looking to gain competitive advantage from a core benefit of the cloud, namely continuous innovation by passing it along to their customers in the form of faster time to market and responsiveness to market needs.” (For more, including industry predictions, see Skok’s blog).

“Technology buyers expect cloud adoption will make managing IT increasingly complex, yet the plurality also expect overall better cost of ownership,” said David Card, vice president of research, GigaOM. “That's either wishful thinking or an intriguing opportunity for suppliers and systems integrators.”