Disaster recovery is the number one application that organizations plan to migrate to the cloud (36 percent). DR is followed by file sharing (30 percent), data backup (30 percent) and data storage (29 percent). These are among the findings of ‘Cloud Adoption in 2017’, a research study conducted by Zetta.
Why are organizational IT departments planning to migrate applications to the cloud? According to the survey, top cloud application adoption benefits include the reduction of IT staff burden (61 percent) and reduced maintenance efforts (55 percent). Other factors include scalability (47 percent), more attractive features and functionality (46 percent) and reduced cost (42 percent). This has resulted in an active adoption of cloud-based applications. In fact, 88 percent of organizations are using cloud-based services or applications today, with nearly 60 percent planning to move more applications to the cloud in the next 12 months.
"Lower cost is typically the most common benefit cited for cloud adoption, but interestingly it followed well behind other key application migration advantages in our recent survey," said Jeff Whitehead, Chief Technology Officer, Zetta. "This shows that increasingly IT is looking to the cloud as a way to not only reduce hard expenses, but also to reduce the burden on staff. The cloud is transforming more complex applications such as DR which have traditionally been considered expensive and time-consuming to implement and manage. Now the cloud is making these applications more accessible, efficient and reliable."
Not all applications are considered good candidates for the cloud. Of those applications IT isn't planning to migrate to the cloud, financial and accounting applications top the list (54 percent), followed by in-house/custom applications (44 percent). Security is cited as the top reason for not migrating applications to the cloud (62 percent), followed by cost (44 percent) and compliance (33 percent).
Zetta surveyed 385 IT professionals to learn more about their experiences adopting cloud technology in their organizations. The survey was conducted online in March 2017 and included organizations in more than 13 industries, ranging in size from less than 50 to more than 1,000 employees.
