Introduction
The fact that Cloud Computing has achieved a mainstream deployment status across the UK market can be of little doubt these days. The latest research reported in this White Paper demonstrates that 69 per cent of organisations have formally adopted (i.e. via the IT function) at least one Cloud-based service within their business, and satisfaction with the use of Cloud solutions remains high with 91 per cent of users stating satisfaction with their decision to deploy a Cloud service.
Looking to the future, the trajectory of growth looks equally healthy with 68 per cent of current Cloud service users claiming they will extend the use of Cloud solutions within their business over the next 12 months, and almost a third (31 per cent) of organisations that don’t use a Cloud service today saying they intend to adopt the first service during the next 12 months. In fact, less than 4 per cent of organisations in a detailed survey of 250 stated they had no intention of adopting a Cloud service. A further sign of health of Cloud is that 78 per cent of organisations stated that they actively consider whether a new or replacement IT service should be delivered as a Cloud service versus on-premise (i.e. it is considered a credible deployment model on a case-by-case basis).
So is Cloud the nirvana of IT deployment models? Will everything transition to the Cloud? Are we facing the terminal demise of on-premise IT? The short answer to all these questions is clearly, NO! The slightly longer answer is you simply can’t lump together every IT need and every type of business and map out a common IT deployment model for them all, it is neither practical nor reasonable nor necessary. In fact in the case of the research, when asked if the participants had any plan or intention to move all services to the Cloud around 50 per cent said they would, but with caveats as to when, whilst the other half had no intention to move everything online. For the foreseeable future, IT will be a truly hybrid environment for most organisations, hence we will see the formalisation of disciplines around the management of Hybrid IT!
