Companies "Not" Using Cloud Will Be In Minority Soon

It’s that time of the year again – time to look back and evaluate. Cloud computing was undoubtedly the most talked about term of the year, and for valid reasons. Let’s find out the key take-aways and predictions from this year’s cloud usage reports analytics, and surveys.

With a lot of hype and chatter going around cloud these days and more and more startups adopting it in one form or the other (public, private or hybrid), it’s enough to make a techie feel sad knowing one of the every sixteen businesses still has no cloud access. We are yet to know what the future holds for cloud, but one thing that we can be sure of is that cloud is here to stay. While most large enterprises have begun realizing cloud’s benefits, some organizations are yet reluctant. With insights and assistance fom the Cloud Solutions team of Calance, here I compile a data set of predictions based on various reports to give the organizations a better understanding of where cloud will be headed in near future.

Notably, 94% of businesses are currently accessing cloud in some ways, with around 87% using a public cloud as per State of the Cloud Report 2014 by RightScale. As it took forever for many online businesses to realize smart phones are the current standard for web access, likewise organizations have began realizing that cloud is the current standard for IT. In cases when finance is not a problem and hardware is owned, legacy systems like desktops may still be a preferred choice but, cloud is emerging as the new favored option for business hosting for more than one reason. Many of the organizations with 1000+ employee strength fall under Cloud Beginners or above stages. Compared to 68% of last year, this year this ratio has grown to a whopping 84%.

According to Gartner Inc., 2016 will shape the future of cloud computing and by that time hybrid cloud will start replacing private cloud, and by the end of year 2017, more than half of the big organizations will have hybrid cloud deployed. With a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 33.2% from year 2012 to 2017 in all sectors of the cloud computing market, areas like IaaS(infrastructure as a service) and SaaS(software as a service) are showing much higher growth ratios of 39.8% and 34.4%. The momentous growth in cloud services has resulted from the trending cloud model based IT computing deployment scenario and transfer of conventional IT services to cloud based alternatives.

Not just that, the several new software and applications are now designed to keep in mind cloud. It is assumed that by the year 2016, more than 1/4thof the totally designed applications (around 48 millions) can be accessed through cloud. With this, it makes sense when 56% of the organizations are taking cloud as a strategic differentiator and more than 58% of the organizations spending 1/10th of their budget on cloud services to support accelerated innovation and operational excellence. Cloud is here to stay and it is estimated that its adoption ratio will reach $250 billion by 2017.

Cloud computing is getting globally accepted to develop, manage supply chains and market & sell products. With evidences like stated above to prove that cloud is reaching liftoff, the question that lies here is where you’d like to stand in coming years?