How Quickly are Enterprises Adopting the Cloud?

Clearly, cloud adoption is on the rise. A recent survey by CDW, the distributor, offers interesting insights into what enterprises think about Cloud computing and where it plays in their future plans. The survey which covered organizations in business, government, healthcare and education found that 28% of US organizations are implementing a specific IT-endorsed plan and have a disciplined methodological approach. However, a lot more firms are testing the waters. According to the survey, 84% of organizations have employed at least one cloud application.

The difference between the numbers shows that the cloud is certainly of interest and many are trying/using cloud applications, but at more of a departmental/project level. There isn’t large-scale corporate IT buy-in to cloud computing as yet.

Interestingly, looking at the distribution of organizations moving to the cloud, the survey found that large businesses at 37% were most likely to use the cloud. 34% of higher education, 30% of healthcare and 29% of federal government organizations were moving to the cloud. Surprisingly, Small and Medium businesses came in last at 21%. This was surprising to me at first – one would think that SMBs would be more nimble and move to more cost effective technologies first. But look at it another way – possibly this means that agility, not cost is driving the move to the cloud. The large businesses are the ones that are least agile – they have long processes and projects take a long time to even start. As we had discussed in an earlier post, one of the big value propositions of cloud computing is increased agility. The survey results clearly point to agility being the key reason for cloud adoption.

The other not-surprising finding was that 47% of organizations indicated that a private cloud was in their plans, compared to 19% for hybrid cloud and just 7% for a public cloud.