Stern Curator| Whatech
In April 2013, Wakefield Research surveyed 52 CIOs from Fortune 1000 companies and from the Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in America.
It concluded that the future for hybrid cloud was bright, but identified a number of barriers to uptake. A key indicator of the expected popularity of hybrid cloud was the fact that more than 80 percent of respondents said that public cloud solutions were important to their business, and a similar percentage said the same about private cloud. Hybrid cloud allows both these priorities to be satisfied. According to the report of the survey, “Among CIOs using cloud applications, most (67 percent) have already adopted some hybrid tools. CIOs expect the shift to a hybrid cloud configuration to accelerate as more applications become available to meet their needs.”
The survey, however took a rather narrow definition of private cloud. “We define hybrid cloud resources as those hosted both on-premise and externally on the cloud,” it said. A more generally accepted definition is that hybrid spans private and public and tht private cloud can be on or off premises.
According to Wikipedia, “Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models.”
And for Wikipedia private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organisation, but which can be “managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally.”
The most used cloud application reported by survey respondents was customer relationship management (76 percent), followed by sales and marketing processes (60 percent), employee or client communication (57 percent) and human resources (55 percent).
“Among CIOs using cloud applications, most (67 percent) have already adopted some hybrid tools,” the report said. “CIOs expect the shift to a hybrid cloud configuration to accelerate as more applications become available to meet their needs… Data management (29 percent) and sales and marketing (29 percent) are the resources most often hosted in a hybrid configuration, followed by project management (26 percent) and human resources (24 percent).”
The survey also identified a need for cloud migration services, such as those provided by BitCloud. ‘Among hybrid cloud users, more than 1 in 4 (29 percent) feel the process of integrating services in a hybrid cloud has run behind schedule. It takes, on average, six months to achieve full integration – meaning the company is able to offer a seamless experience to the end-user.”
It added: “For a successful relationship between a hybrid cloud service provider and a company to last, the vendor must understand an organisation’s environment and goals.”
About BitCloud
BitCloud is a leader in cloud services and managed IT services for growing and mid-market businesses.
With over 17 years experience, BitCloud helps you run your business with:
- Managed Cloud Services that save you time, improve productivity and reduce IT costs
- End-to-end, scalable and managed IT services that grow with your business – no contracts
- Custom Business Continuity Plans that give you added security and peace of mind
