Why Are IT Professionals Investing in Cloud?
A new survey of 343 IT professionals conducted by IT professionals network Spiceworks indicated the majority of organizations currently leverage at least one cloud service.
The survey, titled “Diving into IT cloud services,” revealed 93 percent of organizations currently are using at least one cloud service, and 30 percent of organizations expect more than half of their IT services to be cloud-based in two to three years.
In addition, the survey indicated:
- For IT professionals considering cloud services, cost (71 percent) was the most important factor during the decision-making process, followed by reliability (58 percent) and data security controls (41 percent).
- In terms of the most commonly used cloud services today, web hosting (76 percent) ranked first, followed by email hosting (56 percent) and cloud storage and file sharing (53 percent).
- In the public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) category, IT professionals indicated Microsoft Azure was the most commonly used at 16 percent, followed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 13 percent.
“While we expect to see a major shift in IT services moving to the cloud in the next few years, IT professionals are still being cautious about adopting emerging cloud services like IaaS as they familiarize themselves with the providers,” Sanjay Castelino, Spiceworks’ vice president of marketing, said in a prepared statement. “The results show that IaaS lacked strong brand associations across the board, but this will most certainly change as adoption of IaaS increases and familiarity with brands grows in the market.”
The cloud market could continue to grow over the next few years as well.
A Dec. 2015 Soliant Consulting study indicated the cloud industry is expected to be valued at $270 billion by 2020.
What are your thoughts on the new Spiceworks survey? Share your thoughts about this story in the Comments section below, via Twitter @dkobialka or email me at dan.kobialka@penton.com.
