Salman Ul Haq| Cloudtweaks
Will cloud live up to its hype” is a question which has become irrelevant now. Looking back now, I’d say the opportunity is much, much bigger than the hype. Perhaps for some companies, the move to the Cloud has been one of the most rewarding experience in IT investing. A latest survey reveals that early adopters of the Cloud continue to dive deeper and increase their cloud adoption because of the value they’re reaping through increased adoption.
The survey was conducted by Rightscale in the first quarter of 2013 and included 625 companies, categorized respondents into four different cloud maturity levels: Cloud watchers, beginners, explorers and focused. A diverse set of respondents were chosen from development, IT and business roles across a wide range of company sizes and industries, including financial services, media and publishing, education, digital agencies, and software companies.
Out of those surveyed, 17% of the respondents are beginning to adopt cloud, developing cloud strategies and plans but haven’t yet implemented cloud projects. What’s interesting is that a large number of respondents (26%) have started to execute their very first proof-of-concepts cloud projects. An equal number of companies (26%) have matured their cloud adoption and are increasing their investments in new cloud projects. Next comes companies who have implemented their first cloud projects (23%). Only 8% of the respondents are still on the sidelines, and it’s now only a matter of time before these companies also start investing in the Cloud.
The survey reveals a significant percentage of companies who have invested in various cloud offerings and with the traditional barriers of bandwidth and storage crumbling, as well as the availability of viable solutions which address the cloud data security issues, cloud adoption is only bound to increase.
The survey provides meaningful insights into how an organization’s level of cloud maturity impacts both the benefits they are able to realize and the challenges they perceive. The results also reveal a clear cloud imperative – more cloud adoption unlocks more cloud value. The data also shows that investments in cloud adoption will continue to drive increased value for the businesses.
The survey also draws a comparison between cloud adoption rates of large (>1000 employees) enterprises, 77% of which sizeable cloud investment versus smaller companies, 73% of which have adopted cloud. Another interesting data point revealed in the survey is the preference by larger companies to diversify their cloud portfolio. 47% of the large enterprises said they have adopted a hybrid cloud strategy, making use of both public and private cloud for their enterprise application portfolio.
The survey verifies that cloud computing has reached the tipping point. With early adopters reaping the benefits of the cloud and continuing to invest more, it has created a network-value effect, driving further adoption.
