Cloud Adoption High for Mission-Critical Workloads, New Studies Reveal

Two cloud-specific reports have confirmed each other's conclusions—that a larger percentage of organizations now trust cloud solutions for mission-critical activities and workloads. The reports also offer strong evidence that supports the Cloud's value proposition as more than a cost-cutting strategy, an assertion that we at DynaSis have been making for years.

The 2015 "State of the Cloud" survey found that IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in particular is seeing a large uptick in adoption, with 70% of companies that use cloud solutions deploying IaaS. With IaaS, organizations migrate some or all of their workloads to servers hosted and managed at a data center by a third-party vendor such as a managed services provider (MSP). The vendor is responsible for maintaining security, maintenance and repair, technology upgrades and all other aspects of hardware operation. Many MSPs also include support for the contents of the hosted servers, such as application support, in their monthly fee, as well.

Within a few months of State of the Cloud, Gartner released a survey regarding corporate cloud adoption plans through 2017 that echoed the State of the Cloud findings. The Gartner report clearly indicated that enterprises are running mission-critical and production grade projects in the cloud, as opposed to the "pilot projects" often cited in prior surveys. "This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation (SFA) and email," said Gartner Research VP Joanne Correia in response to the findings.

Gartner also found that although cost reduction continues to dominate as the main reason for cloud investment (44 percent of respondents), participants in CIO and IT director roles rated three non-financial drivers—"cloud is a modern approach," "innovation" and "operational agility"—as more important than cost. Senior IT leaders also rated "business advantage" as a top driver.

For SaaS (Software as a Service, where application suites like Microsoft Office 365 are hosted in the cloud by a third-party), respondents felt the key driver was the elimination of IT management resource and expense, with the corresponding redirection of limited in-house staff to other responsibilities. Other top benefits of SaaS included rapid deployment, faster access to innovation and the lower upfront costs associated with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

The survey also found that many organizations are addressing privacy and security concerns (as well as fears about government spying) by moving away from public, heterogeneous cloud models such as DropBox. In their place, Gartner says, firms are and will continue adopting private cloud models that include not only in-house managed clouds but also cloud environments hosted securely by third parties such as MSPs. This trend was seen as so strong, based upon survey results, that Gartner expects private cloud deployment to grow at nearly twice the rate of public clouds (46 percent versus 24 percent) over the next two years.

In the report, Gartner concluded that CIOs are focusing on the cloud "to establish a modern, innovative IT environment with operational agility and business advantage as key outcomes." This is precisely the reason DynaSis has long promoted the cloud as the "must have" solution for modern businesses, now and in the future.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.