Earlier in the year, Gartner forecast that by year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of global companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in a public cloud platform. These services can scale very quickly, which has made them very popular for applications that have a requirement for flexibility.
Cloud storage offers organizations significant cost and agility benefits, but can pose some security, privacy, accessibility and performance challenges. Therefore, a big part of selecting a best-fit cloud storage provider is investing the time to perform the research to fully understand its capabilities.
Furthermore, most industry analyst prior market studies have uncovered that Line of Business leaders are most likely to procure public cloud service offerings for their organizations.
However, survey participants at two recent business technology events on the East Coast were divided about who in their organization is primarily driving their cloud computing strategy.
So, given these latest findings, who exactly is leading the transition to cloud services? Actually, it can vary, based upon the type of organization. Top-level executive decision makers and lower-level IT management staff respondents were within 4 percentage points of each other.
Profile of Cloud Storage Service Demand
Avere Systems released the findings of a recent cloud adoption study conducted at the “2014 Cloud Expo New York” and the “2014 AWS Summit,” also held in New York.
Which industries are leading the move to public cloud service adoption? In addition to a cross-section of technology companies, life sciences and finance organizations were most interested in adopting cloud computing solutions.
Forty-six percent of respondents are already building a hybrid cloud — with 35 percent doing it on their own and 11 percent leveraging a partner. Moreover, 31 percent of respondents do not have a hybrid cloud plan in place at this time.
Thirty-three percent are planning to move over half of their storage to the public cloud. Fifty-two percent are planning to move less than half to a public cloud service provider.
Data archiving was the most common use for cloud migration, with 28 percent of survey respondents. Corporate file sharing was next with 22 percent of the respondents.
Somewhat surprisingly, 18 percent of the survey respondents indicate that they are migrating all their data-related business processes to a cloud services model.
Other Key findings from the market study include:
- Hybrid Cloud Adoption – 58 percent of attendees are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy. Similarly, 58 percent of attendees plan on migrating at least some of their on-premises applications to the cloud within the next two years.
- Cloud Leadership – 26 percent of attendees indicated that their top level executive team were driving cloud strategy within their organizations, while 22 percent of respondents said storage or data management teams were spearheading these decisions.
- Public Cloud Vendors – 49 percent of respondents indicated that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is their cloud of choice for storage, with 56 percent considering the service for object storage. 19 percent of respondents are considering Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and 13 percent Microsoft Azure.
The entire survey was conducted on-site at the two industry events in New York. A total of 205 respondents were asked a series of questions relating to cloud adoption and cloud storage usage.