For the third year in a row, North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research have produced a survey on The Future of Cloud Computing. The survey was supported by 57 collaborators making it the broadest survey of its kind. The study compiles results from hundreds of respondents, over a third from c-level executives at leading cloud computing companies, to provide a clear picture of drivers, inhibitors and growth of the overall cloud computing market.
Michael Skok, General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, summarized the results: “Cleary, even in the 3rd year of our survey, we’re still very early in the cloud computing revolution. Yet the cloud formations we identified in the last year’s survey continue on an unstoppable rise. Self-empowered consumers and businesses are taking the lead, and in many instances, regardless of IT. But IT is investing heavily in both adapting internal infrastructure and adopting public infrastructure to respond to demand while managing the inevitable issues of compliance and regulation through hybrid approaches. And to realize the promise of the cloud, there is an unmistakable call for the industry as a whole to help reduce complexity, and provide better interoperability.”
Key takeaways from the survey included:
Software as a service is the most common form of cloud computing in use today—in nearly two thirds of organizations, followed closely by infrastructure as a service and storage in the cloud.
“To help accelerate adoption of new cloud based applications to enhance both business agility and resiliency, it’s clear providers need to adopt solutions that prevent vendor lock-in, while maximizing interoperability, reliability, and simplicity.” – Ash Ashutosh, Founder & CTO at Actifio
Enterprises that implement Agile IT architecture to support Agile development have seen provisioning of IT resources reduced from weeks to minutes, accelerating software release cycles dramatically. Our white paper: Cloud-Enabled Software Development and Testing: Putting the Agile into the Infrastructure describes crucial enablers for implementing cloud-enabled software development by adopting an Agile IT strategy.
“The ideal end-state for business is a flexible hybrid cloud strategy where IT is able to aggregate and deliver self-service access to a variety of cloud services, both internal and 3rd party, and run these workloads on any cloud that best fits the service.” – Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix
At Skytap, we’ve seen a record number of new enterprise customers deploy a hybrid cloud architecture using Skytap Cloud. By establishing multiple secure VPN connections back to their corporate networks, data centers, and geographic locations, customers are able to quickly and easily create a secure extension to their existing on-premise infrastructure. This gives enterprise IT the security, flexibility, and control they require—coupled with the benefits of self-service, elasticity, agility, speed, and collaboration that the downstream internal customer groups of IT want.
