Cloud Adoption: Who to Believe?
July 8th, 2009 Posted in Cloud ComputingThere have been a slew of articles in the last few months attempting to shed light on the state of ‘cloud adoption’. Here are a few recent headlines:
- ‘Survey: Fear Slows Cloud Computing Adoption’, Information Week, February 2009
- “Major shift to cloud IT services inevitable, IDC says”. Network World, March 2009
- “Survey casts doubt on cloud adoption”, InfoWorld, June 2009
So, what are we to believe?
It’s clear there are several common concerns with cloud computing, including security, cost control and availability. This is inevitable, as consumers build their trust in cloud providers over time. These concerns were the same when ‘Software-as-a-Service’ started to become popular. See this article from 2006, ‘Security May Dog Software as a Service’ from eWeek. Does this sound familar? Now we have companies such as Cisco, Motorola and Toyota using Salesforce.com.
The key with adoption is to find low risk, high ROI use cases to test new technology. In a recent survey we conducted with RightScale of 75 attendees at Interop, we found Application Development and Test (22%), Grid Computing (15%) and Scalable Websites (15%) topped the list of current use cases for cloud infrastructure. This isn’t surprising, given these use cases all provide high ROI due to their fluctuation in utilization and are relatively low risk (especially application development and QA).
In the future, in addition to the use cases above, attendees at Interop planned to run Line of Business (LOB) applications (23%) and disaster recovery (16%) in the cloud.
It’s still early in the adoption cycle, but just like Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service will become mainstream technologies as customers become more comfortable with them. For more details on the strategies we’ve seen IT managers using to adopt cloud computing, download our recent white paper.
Ian
