ESG Research: 82% companies will apply public cloud within five years

Adequate network bandwidth and its increasing availability, combined with the utilization benefits and dynamic scalability associated with virtualization technology, are making cloud services applications a more realistic option for IT companies. This alternative technology deployment model is premised on the ability of the enterprise to deploy immediately (as well as the decommissioning of applications and/or computing resources), and they have a number of key advantages, such as reducing IT infrastructure costs and allocating resources more quickly, by simply paying for actual consumption. However, "going into the cloud" will create a thorny issue of security and data availability that businesses need to deal with and make significant investments in their existing technology infrastructure and support staff.

For these reasons, ESG, in its "2011 IT spending intent survey", asked respondents to respond to the extent to which they believed that public cloud computing services would affect the enterprise's IT strategy over the next five years. These services can include applications that are hosted on Third-party sites and are provided through the network (i.e., SaaS) and/or cloud-based computing/storage services (that is, IaaS). According to ESG's survey of respondents, more than three-fourths of companies (82% per cent) plan to take advantage of these public cloud services to some extent within the next five years (see Figure 1). However, the vast majority of respondents do not want cloud computing to have a "significant" impact on the IT strategy of their companies. On the contrary, respondents expect, at least for the foreseeable future, they will use these services more tactically, potentially minimizing their short-term impact on existing IT infrastructures and processes for midsize enterprises (100 to 999 employees) and large enterprises (over 1000 employees).

▲ Figure 1. Expected impact of public cloud computing, Source: Enterprise strategy Group, 2011

It is common sense that small businesses will take the lead in cloud computing solutions, but the early trends suggest that large companies have been the forerunners of the technology, albeit largely tactically.

This is reflected in table 1. Table 1 shows that 62% of large enterprises believe that cloud computing has a significant and moderate impact on their IT strategy, while only 47% of midsize enterprises hold the same view. Similarly, in companies with an IT budget of more than 50 million dollars, nearly two-thirds (65%) of businesses believe that public cloud services will have a "significant" or "moderate" impact on their IT infrastructure and/or processes, while only 46% of the companies that spend less than 5 million of their technical products and services in 2011 Companies hold the same view.

Table 1 expected impact of public cloud computing (divided by company size and it budget), Source: Enterprise strategy Group, 2011

One of the basic principles of cloud computing is that these services can reduce costs, whether it is capital spending related to equipment purchases or management-related operating expenses. Based on this, in the enterprise that will adopt cloud computing as the 2011 it cost reduction strategy explicitly, nearly One-third (31%) of companies (the different issues posed by ESG) Expect these services to have a significant impact on their IT strategy, while in the absence of a deliberate way to reduce the cost of the cloud, only 8 It is not surprising that% of companies hold the same view (see Figure 2).

▲ Figure 2. The expected impact of public cloud computing (based on whether cloud computing is a strategy to reduce costs), Source: Enterprise strategy Group, 2011

ESG Research confirms that most IT companies will use cloud computing services to some extent over the next five years, but few companies expect these services to have a "significant" impact on it infrastructures and processes quickly. On the contrary, most respondents seem to be using cloud computing as a major tactical solution to allow their businesses to offload some of their application and infrastructure management responsibilities. At this point, more than half of the existing SaaS and/or IaaS users believe that cloud computing will only have a "moderate" impact on its IT strategy. However, compared to the overall cloud perception of all respondents in Figure 1, it is worth noting that existing users are more likely to believe that cloud services will have a "significant" impact on IT infrastructure and processes (20% of SaaS users and 27% per cent of IaaS users are compared to 13% of all respondents). So, as more and more users are using cloud computing services (and gaining value from cloud computing services), corporate attitudes can change. But large and medium-sized enterprises must first address the security, reliability, and data availability of the public cloud before they consider cloud services as a platform for business or rely on, and then apply them.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)