Exeter-based company Nexus, which also provides Cloud services, has looked into developments in terms of Cloud usage. They have surveyed over 300 businesses with at least 1,000 employees each in order to create a glimpse into how the Cloud is used. The key finding from the report is the sheer increase in how much Cloud is actually been used.
Nexus, an IT company in Exeter that provides Cloud services, has recently surveyed over 300 large organizations with at least 1,000 employees. They were looking specifically at how the Cloud is currently being used and how much it has grown over the years. The findings were very interesting.
The first element of the study looked at how important the Cloud is to customers today. It was found that:
- 93% of businesses use infrastructure-as-a-service or are piloting it.
- 82% of businesses now have a strategy to use the Cloud. In 2014, this was just 74%.
It also came as no surprise that public cloud services are the most popular, even for enterprises. This is also true in terms of workloads. The study showed that:
- 88% of businesses now use public cloud and 63% use private cloud.
- 13% run at least 1,000 VMs in the public cloud. 22% run over 1,000 VMs in the private cloud.
- Businesses expect that the workloads for public clouds will increase soon.
It seems that there is still a lot of opportunity for organizations to adopt the Cloud as well. The study showed that:
- 68% of respondents have less than 20% of their portfolio on the Cloud.
- 55% say that their applications are not in the cloud, but could be.
It also seems that businesses’ central IT services, whether in-house or outsourced, are taking the lead in moving to the Cloud:
- 62% said decisions on how to use the Cloud were made by the IT department.
- 43% of teams have developed a portal to enable employees to access it, with another 41% planning to develop one.
Two specific features, being DevOps and Docker, were highlighted in particular in the Nexus report:
- DevOps adoption has reached an average of 66% and some are up to 71%/
- Puppet and Chef are very popular services, with 24% and 28% of organizations respectively using them.
- Docker, which is a relative new service, is already being used by 13% of businesses and 35% are planning on signing up.
By far the biggest public Cloud is Amazon Web Services (AWS), although Azure is the big up and comer. AWS is adopted by 57% and Azure by 12%. Azure held just 6% on year ago. Furthermore, Azure is narrowing the gap with a 19% adoption, compared to 50% for AWS. In fifth place, after AWS, Azure, Rackspace and Google, is vCloud Air, with just 7%.
Peter Walker, who lead on the survey for Nexus, stated that:
“It will come as no surprise that there is a far greater adoption of internet as a service than what there is for platform as a service, which everybody believed was going to be the next big thing. However, platform as a service (PaaS) is still popular as well, although not among Azure users. Most PaaS users are found with Google users. Internet as a service (IaaS), meanwhile, is being adopted by both Azure and Google and their growth over the past year has been much stronger. We foresee that PaaS will eventually be completely phased out.”
He added:
“We are now living in a time period where those make decisions for IT management have a lot more choices available to them. We believe that, soon, the majority of workloads will be running fully in the Cloud.”