First annual report examines trends in enterprise cloud adoption and usage
29-AUG-2013
by Kevin King
Enterprises and governments across the globe have unique challenges and requirements when it comes to cloud computing. These organizations have ever-increasing needs for secure, reliable, and redundant access to the cloud. To fully embrace that cloud, they demand business continuity services and dedicated connectivity to mission-critical data and applications.
The 2013 State of the Enterprise Cloud Report report, which draws upon Verizon data between January 2012 and June 2013, examines current cloud adoption and usage trends—both in terms of how organizations are deploying cloud technologies and what they want from enterprise-grade cloud services. It considers the factors driving adoption; the growth in demand for VMs, memory, and storage; and expectations for the future of the cloud.
The findings of the report were interesting and in many cases insightful and they speak to the continued maturity of the cloud and growing demands enterprise put on cloud services providers. For example, the use of cloud-based storage has increased by 90 percent during the time period studied, and cloud-based memory by 100 percent. Verizon believes this has been driven largely by the shift of business-critical applications to the cloud. At the same time enterprises are findings ways to increase cloud efficiency – meaning they are able to get more memory and storage capacity out of each virtual machine they deploy. As a result, VMs deployed increased only 35 percent over the same time.
As cloud environments become more mainstream, enterprises use it for more business functions. They have moved beyond development and testing and are running external-facing and critical business applications in the cloud. According to our data, production applications now account for 60 percent of cloud usage.
With more critical applications residing in the cloud, uptime and availability are now essential. Security and related compliance requirements are driving hybrid cloud growth in the enterprise and public sector, and require increased focus on your cloud provider’s data center. Moreover, growth in big data will drive cloud adoption as a result of the increasing demands and volumes associated with data management and analysis.
What is clear to us from this report is that enterprise cloud has reached a tipping point. Organizations have seen the benefits cloud can provide—both in efficiency and cost—and are ready to move an increasing number of mission-critical applications to cloud-based infrastructure. However in order for this to happen, cloud service providers must deliver to enterprise-grade availability and security.
Check out the report for more of the details. To download it below click on the ‘slideshare’ button which will take you to SlideShare, then click ‘save’ at the top of the report window. We’re interested to hear your reactions and thoughts as we’re already starting to work on the 2014 report.
PR Archives: Latest, By Company, By Date