Cloud computing: No more cloudy skies?: Page 2 of 3

Why cloud is growing

When the cloud was first propositioned by vendors, the main case they made was cost savings, as much of IT buying cost can be shifted from a capex to an opex model. Over time cost savings, while still significant to a degree, isn’t why more enterprises are shifting to the cloud.

The oft-most cited reason for using the cloud today is agility – the ability to spin up new services, be they in test and development or in production, in a matter of days instead of months. This helps enterprises launch new competitive services in the quickest way possible in order that they may stay ahead of the competition.

And as counterintuitive as it may sound, building applications and workloads on the cloud also means that they can be shut down as fast as possible should they not succeed. This helps enterprises control costs and help enterprises not be hemmed in by their failures so that they can continue producing services that do work.

Another crucial impetus is security. In the early days of the cloud, there was a lot of scepticism as to how really secure cloud providers were.

However with news that even the largest companies can be hacked – names such as Sony Pictures (pic, above), Target Corp and even the government of the United States – enterprises are now considering why wouldn’t they just let specialist cloud providers grapple with the issue of security rather that mitigate them on their own?

While these cloud security issues remain critical, the accepted thinking today is that reliable and certified cloud providers are secure as can be compared to enterprises running their own data centres.

And then there is the issue of privacy, with the revelations of Edward Snowden (pic, right). While this is a complex issue, the scare around data privacy in cloud providers is somewhat thawing as enterprises are coming to terms with using encryption and vendors are expanding more of their data centres to localised regions and countries in a bid to keep data closer to where businesses are located.

Chief information officers (CIOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs) have also gotten much better at speaking about the value proposition of the cloud than before as much of what is being presented at board level are business issues rather than technical ones.

Recent surveys back up this point. For instance, a recent study by Cisco Systems Inc noted that the cloud will dominate growth and outpace traditional data centre growth by 2020, where 92% of workloads will be processed by cloud data centres and only 8% will be processed by traditional data centres.

Similarly, IDG’s enterprise cloud survey noted that cloud technology is becoming a staple to many organisations’ infrastructure as 70% have at least one application in the cloud, while 16% have plans to do so within the next 12 months. It also noted that 56% of organisations are still identifying IT operations that are candidates for cloud hosting.

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