Cloud computing's only for grown-ups, survey says

By Carl Brooks, Technology Writer 22 Jan 2010 | SearchCloudComputing.com

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EMA's 2010 cloud computing survey results: 52% wanted cloud to "reduce IT operational costs." Out of 850 respondents, 52% said they planned to deploy cloud services both internally and externally, but only 11% planned for exclusively external use. 67% of cloud users said they have used Software as a Service, 43% said Infrastructure as a Service and 42% have used Platform as a Service. 75% of all the organizations who planned for cloud computing said they wanted private clouds first and public clouds later, or not at all.

EMA surveyed more than 800 large organisations, and most respondents stated anticipated concerns about security and interest in potential investment savings. The research painted new adoption of cloud computing as very small overall but exploding in organisations that had already tried it.

"The estimate is 11% of [enterprises overall] are going to cloud next year," said Andi Mann, vice president of research, systems and storage management for EMA and lead author of the study.

"A lot of the griping and whinging you hear is the skeptics, and they certainly exist," he said. Despite the seeming coolness to cloud, though, Mann found that enterprises using cloud computing, public or private, almost always had positive results.

Study participants that already used Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products such as Salesforce.com or Amazon Web Services said that 25% of their IT was already outside the organisation. And by 2012, more than half of IT consumption will be in the cloud. But are these cloud-adopting organisations somehow farther along than those that don't use cloud services?

"There are a number of different areas that point to this idea that cloud boosts maturity actively and not just passively," Mann said.

There are a number of different areas that point to this idea that cloud boosts maturity actively and not just passively. Andi Mann, vice president of research, systems and storage management for EMA

He believes that of the enterprises he researched, those who used cloud services were more likely to have gone beyond ground-level automation and optimisation of IT resources and moved into more efficient, complex management strategies.

Mann said that when they asked respondents about private cloud, they found a clear distinction between low-level service improvements, such as scripting tasks and data centre tools and service management. Those already sampling the cloud had settled the problems of administering and managing their own IT and were looking for better capabilities and performance for their dollars, and could thus be said to have more mature IT organisations.

Virtualisation breeds maturity
"I think that's probably right," said Dr. Rich Wolski, computer scientist at UC-Santa Barbara and CTO at Eucalyptus, a for-profit open source cloud infrastructure provider. He said the progression from running IT to consuming IT did mean an enterprise was maturing. He wasn't ready to say, however, that cloud computing was the source of that maturity, rather insisting that it was the natural outcome.

"The argument against that is that a lot of that comes from virtualisation, not from cloud," said Wolski.

Wolski said that the infrastructure management skills learned from virtualising internally made it easier to look at cloud computing solutions, which can often be tucked right into existing systems management tools using application programming interfaces (APIs).

"So [the next] question is," he said, "how many are going to stop with virtualisation?"

Wolski also said that the rapid uptake was an indication that cloud computing made economic sense. Once IT committed to using cloud services in a small way, they'd be quick to take advantages of even small margins in cost efficiency.

"Large IT organisations have seen lots of technological change," he said. "They are really looking at 'percent' differences. They've seen these changes in the past, they know how to prepare, they know how to ingress, they know how to transition, which is the trick."

Carl Brooks is the Technology Writer for SearchCloudComputing.com. Contact him at cbrooks@techtarget.com.

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