Surveys show cloud now mainstream

It is perhaps hardly surprising but there is now a growing body of evidence to suggest that cloud services have arrived in the mainstream and is fast becoming the IT usage model of choice. Two recent surveys, one from Verizon and the other from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), both show large majorities of businesses now working with cloud services.

The Verizon survey has actually come from the Harvard Business Review (HBR), which looks at the reasons behind business adoption of the cloud.

Overall, the report supports the widely held perception that the cloud is here to stay and creates strong advantages through greater business agility and reduced complexity.

However, interestingly the report also indicates that security concerns are becoming a thing of the past, with 65 percent of respondents seeing no increased risk, and over a third even claiming that the cloud increases security.

Based on a survey of 527 HBR readersin large and midsize organisations across the world, the key findings of the report show that 70 percent of businesses have adopted cloud computing, and 74 percent say cloud has provided a competitive advantage.

Increased agility was cited as the leading benefit by32 percent of respondents, over cost reduction at 14 percent, while 71 percent expect cloud to reduce complexity in their business. Nearly a third of businesses are able to utilise the cloud for greater agility without the need for a greater capital investment.

And on that security issue, over a third (36 percent) of businesses say that cloud actually increases their organisation’s security.

The CIF research, conducted in June 2014, polling 250 senior IT and business decision-makers, indicated a nine-point increase or 15 percent growth over the last research project conducted in September 2013. This suggests an annualised growth rate of nearer 20 percent by the end of September 2014.  Since the first research was conducted in 2010, UK Cloud adoption has grown by 61.5 percent.

Large private enterprises are showing the highest rates of adoption at just over 80 percent, whilst the sub-200 employee organisations are standing at around 75 percent and the public sector is still lagging at around 68 percent.

To set these results in context, the research also recognises that the majority of organisations (85 percent) operate on-premise servers or datacentres. The existence of on-site technology is also a direct influence on the evolution of IT strategy based on historical investment. The co-existence of on-premise and Cloud services by nature leads to a Hybrid IT environment for the majority of organisations.

Other findings in the survey show that, of those using Cloud services, 45 percent use only one Cloud service formally. Of the remainder, 28 percent use two Cloud services, 13 percent use three and the remaining 14 percent use four or more.

The share of organisations formally consider Cloud as a part of their IT strategy now stands at 79 per cent, while 72 per cent of organisations make new IT deployment model decisions based around infrastructure refresh.

In terms of future trends, the survey also identified that 61 percent of organisations reported running Windows Server 2003, which formally goes end of support in July 2015. This is expected to drive a new wave of opportunity for Cloud services adoption over the next year.

Seventy-Eight percent of organisations run IT predominantly with in-house personnel and 22 percent use a managed service provider. MSPs have greatest penetration in the sub 20 employee organisation, where 38 percent claim to rely on an MSP.

Web hosting, email, CRM, data back-up and disaster recovery continue to be the most pervasive Cloud services used.  This is followed close behind by video conferencing, collaboration solutions, HR apps and data storage.

Looking into the drivers for first time Cloud adoption, flexibility of Cloud as a delivery model continues to be cited as the primary reason for adoption among private sector companies (17 percent), while operational cost savings dominates the public sector (21 percent)

“We have now conducted five research projects over 48 months looking at Cloud adoption in the UK, and as such have a sound basis for assessment and evaluation of trends,” said Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF. “Over the next year we can say with some confidence that first time Cloud adoption will increase by 12 points – or 15 percent in real terms. This means that 90 percent of all businesses in the UK will be formally using at least one Cloud service by the end of 2015.  In the near term adoption will be driven in part by the end of support for Windows Server 2003 that concludes in July 2015.”