Are large enterprise companies adopting cloud from the inside out?

Source: TheInfoPro Wave 5 Cloud Computing Study

Do you see the trend in this slide by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research?

For one, internal private cloud remains the top priority for many enterprise customers from a cloud investment perspective. BUT, it is losing ground to the 2nd most important need:  assessing Cloud Providers.  Is this an indication that the next logical step in a company’s cloud evolution is a move to public cloud? Of course it is, but it is not without its challenges. Cloud Computing News did a great write-up summarizing the TheInfoPro research report here.

I believe that for large enterprise customers, internal private cloud will be the preferred cloud type for the next 5 to 10 years for the very reasons outlined in the Cloud Computing News post and the research by 451 Research’s TheInfoPro:

  • Politics
  • Budget
  • Time
  • Staff

Related to the above are 4 key concerns prohibiting enterprise customers from taking  the next step towards using a full-on public cloud provider:

  • Security
  • Migration / Integration
  • Processes
  • Resources / Expertise

Hence the reason “assessing Cloud Providers” comes in as the number 2 level of investment.  Enterprise customers want to know what if any of their concerns can be addressed by a cloud provider, and then and only then will they proceed with breaking down the barriers associated with politics, budget, time, and staff.

This is easier said than done for the traditional medium to large enterprise customer who has years, perhaps decades of investments in technology and technology partnerships that serve as the backbone to the company, that keep the company up and running, that ensure the company is compliant with regulations, that its safe from data breaches.  How do you even begin to combat that? To change that mindset?

This isn’t new news.  The larger the enterprise customer, the slower the adoption of new technologies, especially technologies like cloud which flies in the face of how IT has been defined for the past 20 years. What I cannot seem to put my finger on is the real adoption percentage for public cloud services among enterprise customers. Depending on who you ask, the adoption rate is anywhere between 17% and 77%.  In a recent SearchCloudComputing article, ” one AMD executive pegged enterprise public cloud adoption to date at just 10%.” In all honesty, I could not find the actual survey – if anyone has the source, do let me know).  The first thing I ask is how is enterprise adoption defined? Is it SaaS, Paas, or IaaS?  SaaS alone would push the numbers higher – think salesforce.com.  What I would like to know is what percentage of large enterprise customers have moved a majority (>50%) of their entire IT infrastructure to a public cloud provider (IaaS)?

Maybe that 10% number is closer to reality.  What’s your guesstimate?

 

2013-10-14T15:07:45+00:00

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