Cloud and the digital imperative

Snapshot of key findings

Cloud adoption remains high with 78% of organisations using Cloud services today and this is likely to increase to 85% within the next two years;
Of those organisations using Cloud, three quarters expect to increase their usage in 2016;
77% of organisations that use Cloud have deployed two or more services and they store, on average, 29% of their data in the Cloud;
Around six in ten (63%) foresee a time when they will move their entire estates to the Cloud, with the remainder intending to keep certain applications in-house;
Webhosting (57%), email (56%), ecommerce (53%) and collaboration services (52%) are the applications most likely to be hosted in the Cloud today;
The biggest growth over the next few years will be in Unified Communications, which promises to deliver significant benefits for end users

On average, it took 19 months to migrate respondents’ applications to the Cloud;
Over two thirds (69%) of organisations were required to invest in additional hardware and software in order to migrate their applications;
The vast majority were satisfied with their chosen methods of migration, although 93% felt that it could have been improved in some way;
Final decision-making about the move to Cloud falls to the Head of IT/CIO in around six in ten organisations, although a range of internal stakeholders are involved in the decisionmaking process

The flexibility of the delivery model (77%) stands as the most common reason given by Cloud users for their initial adoptions. This is followed closely by scalability (76%) and 24/7 service dependence (74%);
Over two in five (45%) say that enabling innovation is a business objective driving their continued investment in Cloud. Enhancing business continuity (37%) and improving customer service (31%) are the other objectives most likely to drive investment;
64% have found that using Cloud has saved their organisation time and 86% report that their organisation has experienced at least one intangible benefit of Cloud Inhibitors of Cloud:
Security concerns are a primary reason for not wanting to move specific applications to the Cloud for two thirds of organisations;
Similarly, during the decision-making process for Cloud migration, 75% were concerned about data security and 56% about data privacy;
However, the vast majority (98%) of all respondents have never experienced a breach of security when using a Cloud service

A minority (16%) currently have a Digital Transformation strategy, but a further 55% report that their organisation is in the process of implementing one;
Digital Transformation strategies benefits Cloud users – 38% of organisations using Cloud and that have a Digital Transformation strategy say that Cloud has given their organisation a significant competitive advantage;
79% of respondents whose organisation has implemented a Digital Transformation strategy say that Cloud is important/very important to it;
The driving force behind an organisation’s Digital Transformation strategy (60%) is most likely to come from the CIO in the organisation