Cloud Is Helping Companies Avoid Disaster

In a recent survey, half of the companies using cloud computing said they have benefitted by avoiding disasters and keeping the business running.

"Disaster avoidance/recovery and business continuity, as cited by 73 percent of all respondents, was the number one expected benefit of moving to the cloud," the survey report by Evolve IP said. "Of those with services in the cloud, five in 10 respondents indicated that they had already experienced that benefit. Improved flexibility (65.5 percent) and scalability (65 percent) followed suit."

Evolve IP, a communications and cloud services company, polled 1,275 IT pros and executives involved in cloud approval or implementation, focusing on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and concentrating on IT and executive beliefs; service adoption; cloud implementation; expectations and barriers; and budgets.

Most of the survey results were predictable, such as: the cloud is wicked popular. Nearly nine out of 10 respondents regard the future of IT as being in the cloud, and 81 percent said they've deployed at least one cloud service. Extrapolated to an average, respondent organizations have deployed 2.7 services to the cloud.

The survey also asked if respondents were "cloud believers." To that question, 70 percent of higher-level executives answered in the affirmative, while 58 percent of their lower-level manager counterparts agreed, which was five percentage points higher than a similar survey conducted last year.

"The upward trend of faith in the cloud among IT managers is notable since it's the IT managers who are often required to manage the deployment of cloud services, demonstrate the tangible benefits of cloud migrations, and select the vendors that will assist with deployments," Evolve IP said.

Of those who have actually moved to the cloud, the overwhelming virtualization hypervisor of choice was VMware ESX, favored by more than 82 percent of respondents. Citrix Xen came in second at 26 percent and KVM was third at 6 percent. However, when it came to deploying apps, Citrix scored somewhat better. It was used by 28 percent of companies deploying JD Edwards applications, compared to 33 percent on VMware. DB2 applications were also more competitive, with Citrix clocking in at 36 percent and VMware at 44 percent.

On the problematic side of things, there was less worry than last year about concerns and barriers regarding cloud implementations, though the primary concerns were the usual big three: security, legal/compliance and privacy.

Other major changes from last year's survey were reported by Evolve IP thusly:

• Survey respondents are slowly gaining more knowledge about the cloud.
• Overall, concerns about moving to the cloud have decreased.
• IT managers are coming around to the cloud, but are not yet as enthusiastic as their directors and executives.
• The number of services in the cloud continues to grow.
• Adoption of Microsoft products in the cloud is increasing.
• Servers/datacenters, desktops and phone systems all saw greater plans for adoption compared to 2013.

"This year's survey reinforces last year's data with a few major changes," said Evolve IP exec Guy Fardone. "We continue to see across the board drops in barriers to moving to the cloud and more support from IT managers as they've become more aligned with business executives. Also, as we have seen in our business, companies looking to move to the cloud on their own are experiencing some hiccups along the way. As a result, almost one in four organizations will use a third-party provider."

Evolve IP is just such a third-party provider and, unsurprisingly, was singled out by Fardone as a good candidate for that job.

Posted by David Ramel on 09/10/2014 at 1:43 PM