Cloud Adoption Is Shifting to Its ‘Second Wave’
In the ‘second wave’ of cloud adoption, businesses are focusing on sales growth and innovation—in addition to earlier goals concerning cost and efficiency.
53% of companies expect the cloud to drive higher revenue over the next two years. The challenge: Only 1% have optimized cloud strategies and 32% have no cloud strategy.
57% of companies are planning to implement or are using some form of the cloud.
44% of companies said their cloud adoption strategies are opportunistic/ad hoc. Only 25% have optimized, managed or repeatable strategies.
44% of companies are currently using or planning to implement a private cloud, 37% are using or planning to implement a public cloud, and 64% are already using some form of hybrid cloud.
48% of cloud adopters said their strategy includes workload portability across public and private cloud resources while 50% said it includes a mix of public cloud, private cloud and dedicated traditional IT resources.
Three key hybrid cloud requirements include portable workloads (33%), security (47%) and policy automation (67%).
83% of companies want to work with their IT incumbent providers to transition to the cloud.
55% of private cloud users expect the cloud to improve IT budget allocation, and 54% expect the cloud to have a positive impact on revenue.
65% of cloud adopters reported that OpenStack is key to their cloud strategies. These respondents also had higher expectations for the cloud to improve key performance indicators, such as revenue growth, strategic allocation of IT budget and the ability to meet service-level agreements.
70% of companies expect to be able to migrate apps and data from their data center to a public cloud and among multiple cloud providers, while 64% expect to have two or more major cloud providers and 64% expect to act as brokers of IT services.
Manufacturing has the largest percentage of companies adopting the cloud, at 33%, followed by IT (30%), finance (29%) and health care (28%).
Sectors slow to move to the cloud include government/education (22%), professional services (22%) and retail/wholesale (20%).