Companies continue their migration of both applications and computing infrastructure to the cloud at a steady pace. They have moved 45% of their applications and computing infrastructure to the cloud already, and they expect well over half of their IT environment to be cloud-based by 2018, according to a recent IDG Enterprise survey of 925 IT decision makers.
On average, IT decision-makers (ITDMs) plan to allocate more than a quarter of their total IT budgets to cloud spending, but organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees are making significantly different choices than larger enterprises in how they spend that money.
The four main drivers moving IT decision makers to cloud computing are:
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Replacing on-premise legacy systems
- Enabling business continuity
- Speed of development
Seven in ten (70%) have already moved at least one application or a portion of their infrastructure to the cloud. Another 16% plan to do so in the next 12 months, while the re-maining 14% plan to move applications or infrastruc¬ture to the cloud within the next three years.
Currently, the average company has 45% of its IT environment in the cloud, with 23% in private cloud, 15% in public cloud, and 7% in hybrid cloud. By the end of 2017, though, the average company expects to have moved 59% of the IT environment to the cloud: 28% in private cloud, 22% in public cloud, and 10% in hybrid cloud.
That's not to say there aren't concerns about the move to cloud; ITDMs name the following as their top three worries in each of the major cloud models:
Public cloud
- 43% Where data is stored
- 41% Security
- 21% Vendor lock-in
Private cloud
- 24% Vendor lock-in
- 22% Lack of appropriate skills
- 21% Security concerns
Hybrid cloud
- 24% Security
- 19% Where data is stored
- 18% Lack of appropriate skills
To read more about how companies are using the cloud, and their near-term plans, download the eight-page Executive Summary, below.