Cloud services are a relatively small part of overall IT spending by enterprises. So identifying factors that could influence future cloud adoption at enterprises is important.
First, look at current adoption of the cloud. Some 38 percent of all organizations taking part in a recent Gartner survey said they use cloud services. But 80 percent of the responding organizations said they will use cloud services in some way in 12 months, including 55 percent of the organizations not using them now.
Gartner (News - Alert) identified three factors which will impact enterprise cloud adoption in the “near to midterm future.”
One of these is that more cloud use will be achieved via “tactical business solutions addressing specific problems, not through broad, strategic infrastructure replacements,” Gartner said.
It is noteworthy that the cloud now includes early adopters and innovators. They still have influence over the cloud.
Also, the impact of cloud services increases for businesses when it comes to the cloud services value chain, Gartner said.
"While rehosting, recoding or recompiling existing applications to run on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) cloud services may have limited impact on the rest of the organization, replacing existing applications with higher level cloud services will have a much bigger impact on the way enterprises organize their business processes to serve their customers," Gregor Petri, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.
"The impact becomes even larger once companies start to explore the new possibilities cloud services offer to reimagine the way they service their customers. This reimagining can entail replacing traditional offerings with completely digital services and products," he added.
In addition, cloud solutions will lead to a diverse portfolio with different times for implementation and migration. Actual timelines for implementation can be influenced by different alternatives, business criticality, and just how complex workloads may be, Gartner said.
Also, applications can be rehosted for use on IaaS, changed to run on PaaS, replaced with corresponding SaaS (News - Alert) (software as a service) applications or the process can be resourced, Gartner adds.
"Given that the use of cloud services currently constitutes only a very small part of the vast enterprise IT market, strategic planners should not make the mistake of taking current cloud use cases to be predictors of future cloud use," Petri said. "Cloud computing is set to have a considerable impact on business in the future which is reflected in the survey finding that around 60 percent of organizations plan increased investment over the next two years to five years, while only 6 percent plan to decrease investments in cloud services."
Overall, Gartner says that cloud computing is a “quickly developing field with many unknowns and uncertainties and little shortcuts of silver bullets.”
It was reported earlier this year by TMCnet that Jamcracker (News - Alert) observed that the largest single segment of cloud adoption is (SaaS), with IaaS in second place.
Also, smaller and medium-sized enterprises are seeing cloud adoption via CSB (cloud devices brokerage) providers, such as telcos and IT distribution channels. In addition, large enterprises and government IT are also seeing more cloud adoption. On-premises and hosted internal CSB deployments appear popular.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey