Cloud Hosting Article

IT departments play the most important role when it comes to how and why businesses use technologies. With so many solutions out there, IT managers have their work cut out for them, but the one technology that is fueling IT spending is cloud computing.

Market intelligence from Forrester Research (News - Alert) says that cloud computing has been getting a nice chunk of IT budgets. When the research firm looked at companies and government agencies, its findings showed that $2 trillion on hardware, software and services. Various areas in the budgets have been designated for improving mobile apps, analytics, security and collaboration software.

The research featured recently in the CloudTimes found that software spending increased last year by more than $540 billion and it is expected to grow 3.3 percent this year and 6.2 percent in 2014, the largest projection for technology categories.

Similarly, IDC (News - Alert) expects public IT cloud services to drive 17 percent of IT product spending and nearly half of all growth across five technology categories--applications, system infrastructure software, platform as a service (PaaS), servers and basic storage.

"The first wave of cloud services adoption was focused on improving the efficiency of the IT department," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC in a statement earlier this year. "Over the next several years, the primary driver for cloud adoption will shift from economics to innovation as leading-edge companies invest in cloud services as the foundation for new competitive offerings. The emergence of cloud as the core for new 'business as a service' offerings will accelerate cloud adoption and dramatically raise the cloud model's strategic value beyond CIOs to CXOs of all types."

The primary advantage of cloud-based technology is that it enables companies, businesses and other organizations to reduce spending and save money by minimizing inherent IT and support costs.

Key drivers for the adoption rates are lowering IT costs and reducing the need to invest in servers and data equipment. Despite the adoption rates and the cost-saving benefits of moving toward a cloud environment, security still remains one of the top concerns as IT professionals make the cloud jump. But confidence is on the upswing.

Working in the cloud helps keep the cost down for all types of businesses and organizations, which is especially crucial in a tight economy when budgets are at stake. It has more flexibility than other network computing systems and increases productivity overall.