Cloud will drive increased revenues over next two years

More than half of decision makers think the cloud will be responsible for driving increased revenues over the next two years, according to research.

Cloud-based applications will not only increase revenues directly, but they will also reduce costs, making the books better balanced, the study by IDC found.

However, the research – which was commissioned by Cisco – also revealed that almost three quarters of the 3,000-plus organisations surveyed don’t have a solid cloud strategy. What’s more, almost one third (31 per cent) don’t have a cloud strategy at all, while just over one quarter (27 per cent) have a mature strategy that could drive increased revenues now.

The study also examined the balance between hybrid, public and private cloud services.

Respondents felt private cloud offers better security, flexibility and scale, but claimed hybrid cloud is the most popular model at present, with almost 70 per cent of those questioned saying they are planning to migrate data between public and private clouds across different cloud providers over the next two years. Security and policy requirements remain their biggest concerns while moving data.

“As we talk with customers interested in moving to the second wave of cloud, they are far more focused on private and hybrid cloud. Primarily because they realise that private and hybrid offer the security, performance, price, control and data protection organisations are looking for during their expanded efforts,” said Nick Earle, Cisco’s senior vice president, global cloud and managed services sales.

“This observation, which drove our strategy to build a portfolio of private and hybrid IaaS solutions, is reflected in the new IDC study, which shows that 44 percent of organisations are either currently using or have plans to implement private cloud and 64 per cent of cloud adopters are considering hybrid cloud.”

Source: thoughtsoncloud