According to a recent survey conducted by cloud management company RightScale, private cloud adoption rate is declining steadily, while Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) keeps surging. For the survey, RightScale reached out to 1002 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations to learn about their adoption of cloud computing.
Source: RightScale
It’s already a well known fact that companies are steadily adopting the Infrastructure as a Service model for their IT needs. RightScale says that 95% of the organisations surveyed are running applications on, or experimenting with, IaaS. In 2016, the IaaS segment was worth $22 billion dollars, but IT spending on infrastructure is in the order of hundreds of billions.
From that, it’s obvious that the bulk of IT infrastructure is still sitting outside the realm of IaaS, but if 95% of companies are using some form of IaaS, then it’s equally obvious that there is universal interest amongst companies – if only to find out what synergies they can achieve with cloud infrastructure.
When this number is looked at along with the rate of decline of private cloud adoption, which the company says fell from 77 percent last year to 72 percent this year, one thing is amply clear: the IT world is slowly inching towards the IaaS model, slowly but surely.
As you can see from the chart below, a large number of companies are using some form of cloud: public cloud adoption inched up, while private cloud moved down a notch.
This is a classic example of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle, where innovators start things, then early adopters come in, followed by the early majority and, finally, the late majority.
Cloud computing is possibly at the end of the early adoption stage and entering the next phase, where it will slowly start drawing in the majority of users. Even the revenue growth of the top cloud service providers shows that there is strong momentum in cloud adoption, because they kept doubling their quarterly revenues last year.
Some key findings by RightScale
- 95 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
- Cloud users are already running applications in an average of 1.8 public clouds and 2.3 private clouds.
- Respondents run 41 percent of workloads in public cloud and 38 percent in private cloud.
- Lack of resources/expertise, the #1 cloud challenge in 2016, was less of a challenge in 2017, with only 25 percent citing it as a major concern, down from 32 percent in 2016.
- Concerns about security also fell to 25 percent vs. 29 percent last year.
You can download the RightScale survey report here.
Thanks for reading our work! We invite you to check out our Essentials of Cloud Computing page, which covers the basics of cloud computing, its components, various deployment models, historical, current and forecast data for the cloud computing industry, and even a glossary of cloud computing terms.
