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With businesses increasingly facing the prospect of running out of storage capacity, adoption of cloud storage technologies continues to grow, according to a report from cloud-integrated storage solutions specialist TwinStrata.
The survey found that 37 percent of respondents have been using cloud computing for three or more years, more than a one-third increase over last year’s 27 percent number.
When compared with last year’s survey, overall adoption of cloud services has steadily increased across all categories, with use of software as a service (SaaS) reaching as high as 62 percent and both cloud storage and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) edging closer to 50 percent adoption rates.
Platform as a service (PaaS) experienced the greatest increase in adoption as more organizations become increasingly comfortable with the cloud, the report indicated.
Interestingly, scalability and storage capacity expansion were the benefits cited the least by organizations without any plans to implement cloud storage, in contrast to current cloud storage users, for whom they were the most commonly cited benefits to cloud storage.
While scalability and storage capacity expansion were the cloud storage benefits most often identified by cloud storage users, the general population determined that offsite data protection for disaster recovery was more compelling.
Despite having the second lowest adoption rate today (at 46 percent, compared with 62 percent for SaaS and 49 percent of IaaS), cloud storage has the greatest expectations. More than 5 out of every 6 respondents (84 percent) use or plan to use cloud storage, more than any other cloud initiative.
The survey revealed that enterprises with more than 1,000 employees (60 percent) have already implemented cloud storage at far greater rates than small businesses and midmarket companies (38 percent) that have fewer than 1,000 employees.
“Overall, we find all cloud initiatives reaching greater levels of maturity. Last year, we found that more organizations intended to use platform as a service and cloud storage than had actually deployed them,” the report said. “This year, we find that we’ve passed the tipping point—across all cloud initiatives, more people have actually deployed cloud services than plan to deploy them.”
When asked about the biggest objection to cloud storage, respondents overwhelmingly selected security and/or loss of control as the single biggest inhibitor to adoption (62 percent).
Cost and uncertainty about cost (38 percent), regulatory compliance issues (31 percent), and performance speed, reliability and uptime (30 percent) were listed as the next three areas of greatest concern.
“It remains clear that organizations require immediate solutions to problems such as rapidly escalating data growth and disaster recovery requirements,” the report concluded. “While enterprise organizations have implemented cloud storage at significantly higher rates than non-enterprise organizations, both groups have a clear desire to use cloud storage to address their growing capacity problem.”