(c)iStock.com/kertlis
If organisations could track all cloud consumption and usage across the enterprise, the majority (57%) would utilise it to improve IT forecasting.
That was the key takeaway from a survey undertaken by enterprise software provider Cloud Cruiser, who collared 279 IT professionals at the recent Microsoft Ignite event in Chicago. Interestingly, 16% of respondents admitted they did not use Microsoft cloud technologies.
39% of those polled said they would use more wide-ranging tracking skills to compare costs across different platforms and vendors, while 34% said they would expand their on-demand and self-service access to cloud. 72% said tracking cloud usage and costs was extremely or very important to their IT function. Despite this, companies generally argued their ability to track and analyse cloud usage and costs was good. 17% described it as excellent, 28% described it as very good and good respectively, while only 27% put it as poor or horrible.
On the whole, almost a third (31%) of companies polled said they preferred a hybrid cloud strategy, while only 6% used all of their IT estate as public cloud. 37% of those polled have a quarter or more of their services in the cloud, 21% of respondents have between a quarter and half of their services in the cloud, while 8% respectively have between half and three quarters and more than three quarters.
“This latest survey is representative of what we are seeing in the market with our partners and enterprise customers,” said Deirdre Mahon, Cloud Cruiser chief marketing officer. “Once an organisation gets serious about cloud, they quickly hit a wall in terms of tracking usage and gaining full control on forecasts – essentially delivering services with efficiency and agility.”
Not surprisingly, Office 365 remains the most popular Microsoft cloud technology currently in use by businesses, with 58% of the vote. Virtualisaton hypervisor Hyper-V (35%), System Center (34%) and Azure (32%) all came a close second. A recent report showed the disparity between Microsoft and Google’s cloud office offerings; smaller businesses were more likely to opt for the search giant, while more Google Apps implementations are done in one go. Similarly, 62% of Office 365 respondents opted for a hybrid deployment strategy.