IDG Enterprise’s 2016 Cloud Computing Survey has found that 70 percent of organizations now have at least one application in the cloud; and adoption is still ramping up. More than half of organizations (56 percent) are still identifying IT operations for cloud hosting.
Top cloud investments focus on business efficiencies including lower total cost of ownership (42 percent), replacing on-premise legacy technology (35 percent), and enabling business continuity (33 percent).
Currently, half of organizations (47 percent) use cloud solutions for email and messaging. But organizations are not looking to maintain the status quo with how they are using cloud. As organizations explore applications they anticipate moving to the cloud in the next 12-36 months, the leading applications are data storage/management and business/data analytics, both at 43 percent.
Organizations are using multiple cloud models to meet their business's needs, including private (62 percent), public (60 percent), and hybrid (26 percent). The percentage of the total IT environment that will be in the cloud in the next 18 months is anticipated to grow. Currently, 23 percent of an organization's IT environment is in private cloud, and that is anticipated to increase to 28 percent. There is similar growth for public cloud (15 percent now to 22 percent in the next 18 months), and hybrid cloud (7 percent now to 10 percent). Organizations are using both traditional and emerging cloud models. Most organizations currently use storage as a service models (45 percent), but as they explore new IT operations to move to the cloud, IT decision-makers are planning to deploy disaster recovery as a service (33 percent), storage as a service (27 percent), database as a service (27 percent), and mobility as a service (27 percent).
Challenges
Even though cloud adoption has become a mainstream solution, new projects still face some barriers. Organizations pay careful attention to where data will be stored, overall security concerns and vendor lock-in. There are also several critical/very important considerations when determining what to migrate, from the sensitivity of the data (82 percent), to importance of the application to daily business operations (76 percent), and the cost of migration (74 percent). With these concerns top of mind, organizations are not just sitting back; 73 percent have adopted at least one cloud security component.
Vendors play a role in helping organizations fully embrace cloud. With industry and federal regulations, organizations are looking for vendors that can meet their existing compliance standards. Private and public cloud vendors should also be prepared to help customers relay security benefits to other project stakeholders.
About the survey
IDG Enterprise's 2016 Cloud Computing Survey was conducted among the audiences of six IDG Enterprise brands (CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld and Network World) representing IT and security decision-makers across multiple industries. The survey was fielded online with the objective of understanding organizational adoption, use-cases, and solution needs with respect to cloud computing. This was a targeted research effort: to be considered qualified respondents must have reported cloud utilization was planned or currently leveraged at their organization. Furthermore, respondents must have reported personal involvement in the purchase process for cloud solutions at their organization. Using these criteria, results are based on 925 respondents.
