Study: Half of All Developers Plan Private Cloud Deployments

If a recent Evans Data study is any indication, private cloud deployments could rise sharply over the next year.

According to the Evans Data Cloud Development Survey, 48.9 percent of developers surveyed said they plan to deploy applications in a private cloud in the coming year. The survey also showed that 29.7 percent of developers polled said they are currently working on applications destined for a private cloud environment, while an additional 19.2 percent said they expect to enter development within the next 12 months.

A private cloud is proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to users behind a firewall.

”Software developers are finding many reasons to develop software for the cloud, whether for a private cloud or public cloud,” said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, in a statement. "Not surprising, while developers want to take advantage of the cloud, our research indicates a strong preference for them to favor a cloud-related development environment to simply extend their existing technology know-how.”

Evans Data polled more than 500 developers for its survey to measure their intentions and adoption patterns related to cloud development. The key areas of interest in the survey included public and private cloud development, types of applications moving first to the cloud, development dynamics and tools for developing in the cloud, data centers and virtualization, security, regulations, benefits, and inhibitors.

Meanwhile, the Evans Data survey also showed that 48 percent of the developers surveyed said they believe Java is the best language for developing in the cloud, followed by C#. Moreover, according to the survey, half of the developers using Amazon public cloud services are using them experimentally or for prototyping rather than for business critical applications. And three quarters of developers said they think that data for applications deployed in the cloud should be backed up outside the public cloud -- either in traditional onsite storage or in a private cloud, Evans Data officials said.