Even as the global public cloud market reached $209.2 billion in 2016, detractors have disputed its adoption, momentum, and longevity. However, recent surveys have compelling results that could put these concerns to rest.
Every year, North Bridge Growth Equity and the research firm Wikibon partner with 53 of the world’s most prominent cloud vendors to conduct the “Future of Cloud Computing” survey. The annual study speaks with 1,351 organizations from across the globe and the results complicate the idea that cloud is not mainstream. We have provided a link here to a full summary of the results, but we have also taken the opportunity to highlight a select few points that caught RapidScale’s attention:
- 90% of organizations have some form of cloud strategy in place
- 42% of companies are driving at least half of their business through cloud-based applications
- 4 in 5 organizations report that they are getting at least some revenue from the cloud
- Only 9% say they don’t use the cloud at all
- The top reasons organizations are moving to the cloud: Scalability (51%), Business Agility (46%), and Cost (43%)
Given the study’s extensive sample size, it offers convincing evidence that organizations are fully recognizing and acting upon the competitive advantages that come with cloud, cloud is not loosing momentum, and that cloud has staying power. The researchers continued on to speak about additional conclusions reached by the study. “Cloud environments will remain predominately hybrid in the coming years, enhancing the importance of a clearly defined cloud governance and orchestration strategy to optimize for security, self-service and agility, while minimizing costs,” said Holly Maloney McConnell, principal at North Bridge.
Cloud-First Approach Becoming the Rule
Here at RapidScale, we place a good deal of importance on where IT decision makers look first when making an infrastructure purchase. The “Future of Cloud Computing” survey made an important discovery on where these individuals are looking. As previously mentioned, 42% of organizations surveyed now have a cloud-first strategy. If they are not purchasing cloud for a refresh cycle, they now have to justify why to the C-Suite. As this number creeps toward 50%, we can now say that cloud is becoming the rule and not the exception.
North Bridge went on to describe the deployments of these aforementioned organizations. They found that the Software as a Service deployment is the cloud consumption model of choice for 7 out of 10 companies. In addition, 58% are using IaaS for at least some soft of computing task and 53% are using cloud for storage. Platform as a Service has the lowest adoption rate but it is expected to grow the fastest over the next two years.
Inhibitors
Even though these organizations found that cloud has now become mainstream, they did admit there are still holdouts to adoption. North Bridge and Wikibon’s survey asked its participants what the biggest inhibitors are to full cloud adoption. The list of top five saw significant change from last year’s survey and are as follows:
- Security (38.6%)
- Vendor lock-in (30%)
- Privacy (28.7%)
- Complexity (24.4%)
- Regulatory (24.3%)
Given cybersecurity’s typical top-of-mind concern in the computing world, we also wanted to underscore that security’s percentage in this survey of inhibitors has dropped significantly in the last two years. This most likely explains why over half of respondents see security as a benefit of the cloud while the other half sees it as a barrier to adoption in this survey.
RapidScale and the End of Cloud Adoption Inhibitors
RapidScale offers a solution to many of the inhibitors described above and that is through our world-class, white-glove managed services. A managed cloud service is an arrangement allowing the customer to subscribe to the desired solution. RapidScale then deploys the service and can act as a dedicated IT team to the client, staying involved as long as the business desires. RapidScale management includes end-user troubleshooting and device setup, operating system management, 100% SLA, licensing management, application management, patches and upgrades to a server, managed backups, 24x7x365 support and more.
RapidScale’s intimate managed services make substantial inroads in addressing the complexity barrier. In addition, our Tier 3 data centers and fully managed virtual security solutions ensure our end users never have to have security worries when consuming RapidScale’s cloud services.
Recent surveys are indicating that the cloud market is well on its way towards maturation, but be sure to check out RapidScale’s suite of services for any user running into a barrier of adoption!
