The Long and Winding Road to the Cloud
Election year polling shows Cloud Services trail Virtualization by double digits.
The Cloud has been a hot-button topic throughout the business world for too long to get accused of being a fad. But is it still seen as possessing more sizzle than steak? Hard to say, but cloud computing adoption rates remain a slow-grower – especially when compared with virtualization.
For five years, InformationWeek’s annual survey has asked the same question: “What are your company’s plans for cloud computing?” This year’s survey results were recently released.
In 2008, 16% of survey respondents said they had already implemented cloud computing. In 2009, it was 21%, then 22% in 2010. It jumped to 31% last year, and to 33% this year. Depending on your expectations, doubling in five years the percentage of businesses using cloud services – or put another way, reaching 1/3 of businesses – is pretty impressive. (Read more on InformationWeek’s survey here.)
But compare the adoption rate for cloud services to another game-changing technology: virtualization. For many – perhaps most – organizations, virtualization isn’t a matter of whether but how much. No one questions virtualization’s core value proposition; the only question is about the breadth of applicability.
In contrast, two-thirds of businesses either have decided the cloud isn’t for them or have yet to pull the trigger. The core value of the cloud may be, for many organizations, in question.
In an InformationWeek article released this week, they identified several factors that may help accelerate cloud computing implementation. IT providers need to offer consistent pricing for cloud services to make the cost/value analysis less, well, cloudy. Also, finding valid metrics and methods for measuring Cloud performance are necessary.
In short, the growing pains for cloud computing are not yet behind us. But don’t count out the Cloud yet. Of the two-thirds of businesses yet to pull the Cloud trigger, 40% are in the planning and evaluation phase now. In fact, only about 1/4 of businesses have no cloud computing plans at present – down significantly from 50% just five years ago.