Click to explore the infographic showing the results from our Cloud Computing Adoption Survey.

Cloud is the new data center. The ease of procuring cloud services is causing an internal battle in many organizations. Business users are poised to fire their IT organizations with the swipe of a credit card. That puts increased pressure upon CIOs to harness this technology to remain relevant. Internally, business users are expecting IT to act as cloud services brokers – IT-as-a-Service. In order to do this, IT needs tools to integrate and manage cloud services.

65% of Companies are Using the Cloud. Why?

Almost two out of three (65%) businesses surveyed say they have implemented more than one cloud service in their IT departments. Of these respondents, 88% are planning on increasing their usage of cloud services during the next twelve months.

Cloud computing is one of the most disruptive IT technology movements ever! Enterprises cite several business drivers for moving to the cloud. The top drivers cited by our survey respondents are agility (21%), scalability (21%), cost savings (19%) and faster time to market (15%).

These findings are part of the first Ostrato Hybrid Cloud Management Survey, a study that explores the broad trends surrounding cloud adoption among IT departments. The survey found that cloud adoption is generating many new issues that IT departments are struggling to deal with. Click on the image to the right to explore the results in infographic format.

Companies of All Sizes are Using Multiple Cloud Providers

The survey revealed that cloud services are popular across the enterprise spectrum. 63% of companies with more than 10,000 employees use cloud services. Almost half (43%) of small firms (100-1000 employees) also deploy cloud services.

Challenges with Hybrid Cloud Implementation

Overall, survey respondents reported that their most pressing challenges were security (45%), management (28%), compliance (26%) and measuring (26%). For larger firms, security remained the number one issue, while integration with other IT services leapt in importance to number two. For smaller firms, cost jumped to second place behind security.

Other findings include:

  • The most popular cloud services already in use are VMWare (48%), Amazon Web Services (48%) and Azure (28%). Google Compute Engine is cited as having the most potential.
  • The most popular cloud automation technologies in use are Puppet (30%) and Chef (21%), followed by Ansible (10%) and Saltstack (9%) to round out the “big 4”. Interestingly, 30% of respondents chose “other”, showing that there is plenty of choice.
  • More than one third of respondents plan on purchasing a cloud management platform in the next twelve months.