Cloud adoption reaching 100%; hybrid cloud now mainstream: Verizon Survey

Cloud adoption is reaching 100 percent which means almost all companies are using cloud, not that all organisations are using cloud for everything, according to Verizon Enterprise Solutions’ 2016 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud report. In last year’s report, Verizon found that cloud spend had grown 38 percent year-on-year. That phenomenal growth continues, with 84 percent of companies saying that their use of cloud has grown in the last year. [caption id=“attachment_1994929” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] Sixty-nine percent of enterprises say cloud has enabled them to re-engineer one or more of their business processes. In addition, enterprises report moving mission-critical workloads to the cloud improves business operations. 88 percent say it improves responsiveness to business needs, 65 percent say it improves overall operations. Verizon’s customers survey found that around half of companies will be using cloud for at least 75 percent of their workloads by 2018. Only 6 percent of respondents said they think their company will have less than 25 percent of workloads in the cloud by 2018. “In just a couple of years, we believe that significantly over half of all workloads — across companies of all kinds — will be running in the cloud,” the survey added. One of the biggest changes seen in the cloud market is a dramatic fall in the barriers to entry of private cloud. This is largely being driven by advances in technology. Lower starting costs mean that private cloud is no longer only suitable for those with huge budgets — even a relatively small number of servers can be economically viable as a private cloud. And this narrowing of the price difference between public and private cloud is changing the value equation. About 27 percent of Verizon customers are using private cloud and 24 percent are using public cloud. And according to the survey, 17 percent respondents said they plan to implement private cloud, while 13 percent plan to use public cloud in near future. Around half of companies now use hybrid cloud, or can easily move workloads between clouds. Nearly 50 percent respondents said they use a mix of public cloud, private cloud and traditional IT resources; and 48 percent have workload portability across public and private cloud resources. For the types of workloads that organisations put in the cloud from early on — like web apps and dev/test — cloud is now dominant. But cloud is rapidly gaining ground even in mission-critical areas — over a third of companies have at least half their ERP workloads in the cloud, the survey stated.