The cloud scores… 100%

The recent survey by Verizon Enterprise Solutions, 2016 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud, just confirmed what we all already know: cloud adoption is approaching 100%, which means that almost every single business has dynamically entered the new era. As a comparison, last year’s survey by Verizon has shown that the expenditure related to cloud solutions has a 38% YoY increase. This impressive increase rate is obviously continuing with 84% of businesses stating that they are using the cloud more than last year.

But, what were the benefits for these businesses? For example, 69% stated that the cloud enabled them to upgrade one or more of their business operations. Another benefit comes from the migration of critical workloads to the cloud, resulting in the improvement of all business operations as a whole. Furthermore, 88% of the participants stated that the cloud helped them improve all their operations. Actually, 50% of Verizon’s customers replied that they will continue using the cloud for at least 75% of their workloads until 2018. The survey concludes that, within the next few years, it is believed that more than half of all the workloads -from businesses of all sizes- will run on the cloud.

Another interesting finding of this survey is the breach to the “barrier” that up until recently did not allow the massive dissemination of the private cloud. This is primarily due to the fact that the low initial cost entails that the private cloud is not exclusively addressed to businesses with huge budgets; even a small number of servers owned by an SMB is now considered financially viable as far as the use of the private cloud is concerned. As a consequence, the financial “gap” between private and public cloud has narrowed.

For example, Verizon’s survey revealed that 27% of the respondents are using the private cloud and 24% are using the public cloud. Actually, 17% of all participants stated they intend to proceed with the deployment of a private cloud solution, while 13% confirmed they will be doing the same thing with public cloud solutions in the near future.

Approximately half the businesses are now using hybrid cloud solutions or are able to migrate their workloads between clouds. Almost 50% of the participants stated they are using a combination of public and private cloud solutions and traditional IT resources. It is evident that the cloud is the preferred choice when it comes to the workload types businesses keep on the cloud almost from the beginning, especially web apps and dev/test. On the other hand, the cloud is gradually conquering another part of the most critical business operations, since one third of the participants stated that they keep half of their ERP workloads on the cloud. So, based on the evidence, it is safe to say that we’re living in the era of the cloud…