Cloud Computing / Public Cloud's Coming of Age a Boon to the Channel

Public Cloud's Coming of Age a Boon to the Channel

By Michael Vizard | Posted 2016-08-18

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Public Cloud's Coming of Age a Boon to the Channel

As the use of public cloud services becomes more widespread, reliance on third-party services to manage those clouds is increasing.
Public Cloud Use

84% of respondents are using public clouds today. Surprisingly, nearly half (49%) report using the Google Cloud Platform, 48% using Microsoft Azure and 42% Amazon Web Services.
Public Cloud Use Plans

Nearly half (49%) said they would increase use by 25% or more over the next two to three years. Another 25% said they would increase use by 50% in the same time period. None said they would decrease use.
Public Cloud Laggards

The vast majority who said they are not using public cloud today said they plan to in the next two to three years. Among those customers, the top platforms cited for future use are Google (60%), Microsoft (42%) and AWS (27%).
Length of Cloud Migration

Almost half (45%) report it took them three to six months to migrate workloads to the cloud. Only 22% said it took them less than three months. The rest (32%) took longer than six months.
Use of Third-Party Services

Just over two-fifths (42%) say they continue to rely on third-party services. Another 29% say they do, but not as much as they probably should. Half of customers planning to migrate to the cloud also plan to rely primarily on third-party services. Another 42% said they would rely partially on those services.
Primary Reason for Relying on Third-Party Services

Almost half (45%) say it's more cost-effective to outsource tasks. Another 20% say the third-party service provider helps them right-size their IT environment. Interestingly, 19% did so because a cloud service provider encouraged it.
Biggest Cloud Migration Challenge

60% said getting end users to make the transition to the new platform was the biggest challenge, followed by 25% who said the internal IT team lacked the skills.
Primary Motivation for Moving to Public Cloud

58% said the public cloud is both more secure and cost-effective. The next biggest issue, at 16%, was lack of skills to manage workloads running on-premise.
Future Drivers of Public Cloud Use

58% cited flexibility when it comes to adding and decreasing the amount of IT infrastructure being consumed. Another 54% said public cloud saves money while 51% said public cloud is more secure.
Past Obstacles to Public Cloud Adoption

Regarding issues that prevented adoption of public cloud earlier, 51% cited data security concerns, 40% concerns over the stability of the cloud service provider and 33% the possibility costs might spiral out of control.
Future Use of Public Cloud

Regarding challenges that might preclude future use of the public cloud, 53% cited a major data breach, 45% a lack of internal resources to manage public clouds and 34% a decline in revenue generated by cloud service providers.
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As the use of public cloud services becomes more common, an interesting phenomenon is starting to occur. A new survey of more than 200 IT managers conducted by SADA Systems, a solution provider specializing in cloud services, finds that reliance on third-party services to manage those clouds is increasing. Rather than disintermediating the channel, it appears that internal IT organizations are more dependent than ever on third-party services from solutions providers in the channel. Although there are still some concerns about the public cloud, the survey suggests that more IT organizations than ever are accepting the fact that public clouds are both more flexible and secure than on-premise IT deployments. What's surprising about these survey results is the strength of the Google Cloud Platform. Google is generally considered a distant third to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in the public cloud. But the SADA Systems survey finds the number of respondents using Google Cloud Platform to be fairly high. That may not mean they have more workloads running on Google Cloud Platform than AWS or Microsoft, but it does suggest that Google's potential in the enterprise has been underestimated.