By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

 

Giagom Research and North Bridge Partners recently released their 4th annual “Future of Cloud Computing” study. There was some great data gathered from the 1,358 respondents surveyed. In case you don’t have time to click through the entire 124 slideshare deck, I’ve pulled out what I think are the 25 most interesting statistics from the study. Here’s the complete deck if you would like to review in more detail.

 

• 49% using the cloud for revenue generating or product development activities (Slide 9)
• 80% of IT budget is used to maintain current systems (Slide 20) <–> GreenPages actually held a webinar recently explaining how organizations can avoid spending the majority of their IT budgets on “keeping the lights on“
• For IT across all functions tested in the survey, 60-85% of respondents will move some or significant processing to the cloud in the next 12-24 months (Slide 21)
• Shifting CapEx to OpEx is more important for companies with over 5,000 employees (Slide 27)
• For respondents moving workloads to the cloud today, 27% said they are motivated to do so because they believe using a cloud platform service will help them lower their capital expenditures (Slide 28)
• Top Inhibitor: Security, remains the biggest concern, despite declining slightly last year, it rose again as an issue in 2014 and was cited by 49% of respondents (Slide 55)
• Privacy is of growing importance. As an inhibitor, Privacy grew from 25% in 2011 to 31% (Slide 57)
• Over 1/3 see regulatory/compliance as an inhibitor to moving to the cloud (Slide 60)
• Interoperability concerns dropped by 45%, relatively, over the past two years…but 29% are still concerned about lock in (Slide 62)
• Nearly ¼ people still think network bandwidth is an inhibitor (Slide 64)
• Reliability concerns dropped by half since 2011 (Slide 66)
• Amazon S3 holds trillions of objects and regularly peaks at 1.5 million requests per second (Slide 71)
• 90% of world’s data was created in past two years…80% of it is unstructured (Slide 73) <–> Here’s a video blog where Journey to the Cloud blogger Randy Weis talks about big data in more detail
• Approximately 66% of data is in the cloud today (Slide 74)
• The number above is expected to grow 73% in two years (Slide 75)
• 50% of enterprise customers will purchase as much storage in 2014 as they have accumulated in their ENTIRE history (slide 77)
• IaaS use has jumped from 11% in 2011 to 56% in 2014 & SaaS has increased from 13% in 2011 to 72% in 2014 (Slide 81)
• Applications Development growing 50% (Slide 84) <–> with the growth of app dev, we’re also seeing the growth of shadow IT. Check out this on-demand webinar “The Rise of Unauthorized AWS Use. How to Address Risks Created by Shadow IT.”
• PaaS approaching the tipping point! PaaS has increased from 7% in 20111 to 41% in 2014. (Slide 85) <–> See what one of our bloggers, John Dixon, predicted in regards to the rise of PaaS at the beginning of the year.
• Database as a Service expected to nearly double, from 23% to 44% among users (Slide 86)
• By 2017, nearly 2/3rds of all workloads will be processed in cloud data centers. Growth of workloads in cloud data centers is expected to be five times the growth in traditional workloads between 2012 and 2017. (Slide 87)
• SDN usage will grow among business users almost threefold…from 11% to 30%  (Slide 89) <–> Check out this video blog where Nick Phelps talks about the business drivers behind SDN.
• 42% use hybrid cloud now (Slide 93)
• That 42% will grow to 55% in 2 years (Slide 94) <–> This whitepaper gives a nice breakdown of the future of hybrid cloud management.
• “This second cloud front will be an order of magnitude bigger than the first cloud front.” (Slide 117). <–> hmmm, where have I heard this one before? Oh, that’s right, GreenPages’ CEO Ron Dupler has been saying it for about two years now.

Definitely some pretty interesting takeaways from this study. What are your thoughts? Did certain findings surprise you?