Cloud interest triples in last nine months
If there was a 30% chance a product will fail, would you buy it? When it comes to cloud computing, the answer for many customers appears to be yes.
That may not be an entirely fair statement, since internal IT systems could have similar failure rates as cloud services. But a new survey shows that interest in cloud computing is rising rapidly even though 30% of respondents say they have lost more than a day of business because of a SaaS service outage.
The global recession has not slowed down interest in the cloud either, and in fact economic troubles are causing customers to look more closely at new technologies that can save them money.
“The rate of respondents reporting that they are beginning to plan or test cloud computing has increased three‐fold in nine months,” according to a survey commissioned by Avanade, a business technology services vendor. Avanade is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft.
An initial survey in January found that 3% of respondents were planning cloud computing deployments or undergoing trials in preparation for them. Now that figure is 10%, according to updated survey results released this week.
“During the same period of time, companies reporting no plans to adopt cloud computing declined from 54 percent to 37 percent,” the report continues.
The survey, conducted for Avanade by market research firm Kelton Research, polled 502 C-level business executives and IT decision-makers. While 30% reported significant outages in software-as-a-service platforms, the downtime hasn’t steered them away from then cloud. More than 90% of respondents who use a SaaS service say it has been largely successful, and 62% plan to increase use of software-as-a-service in the next year.
Businesses that store critical data should tread carefully, though. Another survey, by Unisys, finds that 64% of Americans don’t want their personal, confidential data held by a third party. Identity theft is the top security concern, the Unisys survey found.
But IT shops can embrace cloud computing without storing critical data outside their network. What it takes is a hybrid approach that uses the cloud for certain applications but maintains some or most IT functions in-house. That’s what the vast majority of businesses plan.
“While companies are moving toward cloud computing, there is little support for cloud-only models (just 5 percent of respondents utilize only cloud computing),” Avanade says in a press release announcing the survey results. “Rather, most companies are using a combination of cloud and internally owned systems, or hybrid approach.”
The hybrid approach makes sense, particularly for large enterprises, Avanade CTO Tyson Hartman says in the release. “No one is going to rip and replace decades of legacy systems and move them to the cloud, nor should they,” he says. “Additionally, at this stage of cloud computing maturity, not every computing system is appropriate for the cloud.”
