Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?

In my post from yesterday, Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?, I shared my view that there is a shift of many companies to the cloud.  In this post I want to share a little external validation that backs that up and helps quantify if cloud adoption is really happening or coming to an organization near you soon!

What the Analysts and Management Consultants are saying

We all know that not everything analysts and management consultants predict, and say, comes true. They are in a tough spot having to predict the future for sure reliant on information flowing from their many contacts and surveys. What we can do though is look at a variety of sources and from that draw some clear conclusions.

• Gartner – Source
  • By 2020, a Corporate “No-Cloud” Policy Will Be as Rare as a “No-Internet” Policy Is Today”
  • … organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner’s 2015 cloud adoption survey
  • By 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centers.

• KPMG – Source
  • The question is no longer: ‘How do I move to the cloud?’ Instead, it’s ‘Now that I’m in the cloud, how do I make sure I’ve optimized my investment and risk exposure?
  • Cloud continues to drive disruption in the business world across the globe. In fact, a recent global KPMG survey 800 technology industry leaders ranked cloud as the technology that will have the greatest impact in driving business transformation for enterprises.

• IDC – Source
  • By 2020 clouds will stop being referred to as ‘public’ and ‘private’. It will simply be the way business is done and IT is provisioned.
  • IT buyers are shifting steadily toward cloud-also and cloud-first strategies. In fact, IDC predicts that 70% of CIOs will adopt a cloud-first approach by 2016

• McKinsey – Source
  • In the next three years, enterprises will make a fundamental shift from building IT to consuming IT
  • The big takeaway: enterprises are planning to transition IT workloads at a significant rate and pace to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, with off-premise environments seeing the greatest growth in adoption

It is not if but rather when and in what form

The conclusion you can draw from all of this is that it is not a matter of “If” you will move to the cloud but “when” and in “what form”. Of course there is a lot to consider when it comes to your choices around cloud!

• Will you focus on IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a- service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)?  Maybe even all three for different goals?
• Will you use Public Global Cloud, Public Sovereign Cloud, Private Cloud or go for a Hybrid Cloud approach?  This is something many overlook getting stuck on the first question.
• Will you look to move existing “low-hanging fruit” workloads or start with new projects there now to start to learn today or will you go all in as some companies have!

In fact Microsoft often uses the image below to present the options in terms of the different operating models of the cloud.

Where to start then?

With all these options and all these choices it is clear that there are many different doors you can open to start your cloud journey. Often people get stuck pushing back against one option when there are others that make as much sense and can move much more quickly.

In my future posts I will be utilizing some external surveys, which have been conducted by various companies, to share what organizations around the world are doing when it comes to cloud and present you with a broader view as to what options the cloud brings.

If you are willing to think holistically then you are ready to adopt cloud today somewhere in your organization!

_{Although I work for Microsoft these thoughts are 100% my own & may not reflect the views of my employer.}