Cloud Gains Software Development Momentum

If solution providers really want to understand where IT is heading next, they should follow the application workloads. There's no doubt that more application workloads than ever are showing up in the cloud. The more important question for the channel is regarding the rate at which this is happening. A survey of 300 IT professionals conducted by Adaptiva, a provider of IT management software for Microsoft environments, finds that 86 percent of the respondents either use, or soon plan to deploy, application workloads in the cloud. The biggest benefit of that approach is the elimination of IT infrastructure running on-premise, the study finds. Not only do IT organizations have to lay out capital to acquire those systems, the care and feeding of those systems—from the amount of energy consumed to the IT professionals required to serve them—is costly. In fact, the majority of IT execs surveyed said software deployment in the cloud makes their jobs easier. Although cloud computing in its current form has been around for about a decade, in terms of mainstream use, an era in which the cloud is now the default option for deploying application workloads is just now dawning.