Many large organizations are already active in cloud
computing in some form and are planning more deployments, according to a CA Technologies study.
Many enterprises, including the largest, are actively
exploring cloud computing, according to the results of a study released by CA
Technologies on Dec. 16.
More than 80 percent of surveyed enterprises and 92
percent of the largest enterprises, have at least one cloud service, the report
found. Additionally, more than half, or 52 percent, of organizations using the
cloud claimed to have more than six cloud services.
The results indicate that "there are more cloud
implementations within the enterprise than people were aware of," Jay Fry,
vice president of marketing for the cloud computing division at CA
Technologies, told eWEEK. The report indicates that IT administrators are
starting to get some visibility on what the various groups within the organization
are working on, he said. As more people begin to discuss the cloud within the
enterprise, the visibility will continue to improve, said Fry.
In the past, there were "rogue deployments" that the
company's IT staff didn't even know about, because the individual line of
business was purchasing software-as-a-service offerings without involving IT.
Some departments were temporarily sourcing application development and testing
resources in the cloud to complete their tasks, Fry said. These implementations
were "hidden" from IT because they weren't necessarily a "known corporate
initiative," he said.
Collaboration tools such as hosted e-mail, antivirus and
spam filtering and Web conferencing software accounted for a bulk of cloud
deployments, at 75 percent, according to the report. Infrastructure and
development platforms in the cloud are also gaining popularity, as 58 percent
of large organizations are already using these services and 43 percent are
considering them, the report said.
There was no big difference in how the surveyed IT
professionals viewed public and private clouds, which was a little surprising,
said Fry. Respondents cited cost savings, resource efficiencies, flexibility,
and scalability as the reasons to move to both types of cloud infrastructure,
according to the report. Security was both a driver and a deterrent for public
and private clouds, said the report.
How long a cloud system has been deployed within the
organization influenced how IT staff viewed the benefits of the project, said
Fry. The primary incentive for initially going to the cloud is to trim costs,
he said. While that result was expected, the report found that IT staff
considered other benefits, such as agility and adaptability as soon as six
months after deployment, said Fry.
The act of "decoupling applications from hardware frees
people's mind to start thinking, -What else can we do?' and gets their minds
pointing in the right direction," Fry said.
Nearly half, or 43 percent, of virtualization deployments
in surveyed enterprises were managed services, the report found. E-mail
deployments were generally the most likely to be managed, but industry-specific
applications were likely to take advantage of full cloud features, such as
advanced automation and full disaster recovery, according to the results.
In general, virtualization maturity resulted in more
optimistic attitudes toward the cloud. Virtualization-intensive organizations
are four times more likely to move as many services as possible to both public
and private clouds, according to the report.
CA Technologies plans to conduct the study again next
year, although the timing has not yet been determined. Fry expected to notice
more increases in the number of enterpricies with cloud deployments, but also a
shift in attitude for IT staff. While members of the IT staff in general were
positive about the cloud because they wanted to work with the latest
technology, roughtly half of all respondents also saw the cloud as a risk of
job loss and control, according to the report.
This was also expected as "anytime there's a shift in how
things are done in IT, people wonder, -What is in it for me?' and -What will it
mean for my job?'" even if there is widespread interest in experimenting with
the technology, Fry said.
Overall, the study "confirms" that large organizations
are embracing and are already active in cloud computing, said Fry.
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