The vast majority of businesses are pursuing a cloud adoption strategy with the primary goals of improving IT efficiencies and reducing costs, according to a survey of 279 IT professionals by Cloud Cruiser and Dimensional Research.
According to the survey findings, reducing costs and looking for IT efficiencies continue to be the top benefits companies seek with their migration to the cloud.
Nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents indicated that tracking cloud usage and costs is extremely or very important to their IT function, which applies to all cloud deployment models including private, third-party private, public and hybrid.
“Perhaps the most surprising finding from the survey was the sizable disconnect between the importance respondents attribute to the ability to track cloud usage and costs and their ability to actually do so. Seventy-two percent of respondents rated the ability to track cloud usage and costs as extremely or very important, while only 45 percent of them rated their ability to do so as very good or excellent,” Andrew Atkinson, senior director of product marketing at Cloud Cruiser, told eWEEK. “There is major opportunity for companies of all sizes to close this gap by working with vendors who specialize in this complex, emergent space.”
The survey also indicated that the pace of cloud adoption continues to be swift as more than one-third of those surveyed have a quarter or more of all IT services in the cloud.
The study revealed that if respondents have access to consumption or cloud-usage information across their entire enterprise, 57 percent said they would like to improve IT forecasting, and 39 percent would compare costs across different cloud service platforms.
Just over a third (34%) said they plan to expand on-demand and self-service access to the cloud, and 30 percent hope to better match allocation versus utilization.
“There is no question that migration to the cloud will continue to be a top priority, for reasons both of efficiency and costs savings and for the increased business agility that cloud provides,” Atkinson said. “We are still in the early days of the cloud migration. Steve Carter at 451 Research noted that cloud adoption today resembles the adoption of virtualization technology in 2008. If cloud adoption reprises the virtualization story, we can expect to see very rapid uptake over the next few years.”
He noted although the survey did not break out responses by company size, it has been his experience that smaller companies are very enthusiastic about the cloud because it gives them an opportunity to get access to technology resources that were previously far beyond their reach.
“Security is always a concern, of course, but smaller businesses are well aware that cloud providers have a much greater ability to maintain a secure environment than they do, and that all of the breaches we’ve been hearing about have been in company and government systems run by their own IT departments, so doing it yourself is no guarantee of safety,” Atkinson noted.