Cloud Adoption Is Shifting to Its ‘Second Wave’

Cloud Adoption Is Shifting to Its ‘Second Wave’

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.

High Expectations

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.

Cloud Status

57% of companies are planning to implement or are using some form of the cloud.

Adoption Strategies

44% of companies said their cloud adoption strategies are opportunistic/ad hoc. Only 25% have optimized, managed or repeatable strategies.

Implementation Plans

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.

Mixed Strategy

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.

Hybrid Cloud Drivers

Three key hybrid cloud requirements include portable workloads (33%), security (47%) and policy automation (67%).

Incumbents Win

83% of companies want to work with their IT incumbent providers to transition to the cloud.

Performance Indicators for Private Cloud Users

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.

OpenStack Rules

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.

More Control

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.

Leading Adopters

Manufacturing has the largest percentage of companies adopting the cloud, at 33%, followed by IT (30%), finance (29%) and health care (28%).

Cloud Laggards

Sectors slow to move to the cloud include government/education (22%), professional services (22%) and retail/wholesale (20%).