Cloud computing has been the subject of intense debate in the past three years, with arguments vying for the technology and hailing it as the next phase in enterprise IT management while challengers state it is only a new name for existing computing models. More recently however, a number of catalysts such as the increasing smartphone adoption and the current economic climate have pushed cloud computing to the forefront of business and consumer interest.
In a new report, Visiongain expects the global market for cloud computing will grow from $30.6 billion in 2011 to $82.9 billion by 2016. The business segment is increasingly adopting different aspects of cloud services in order to capitalize on the numerous advantages offered in software, platform and infrastructure. Cost-savings, scalability, adaptability to market demands, faster time-to-market and flexible payment methods are enticing large enterprises as well as small and medium sized businesses into the cloud.
The cloud offerings available on the market today are as diverse as they are numerous. The spate of vendors and providers offer different types of models and services which can easily overwhelm those looking to capitalise on the benefits offered by the cloud. Choosing the right provider and service is critical to ensure the cloud offering is appropriate customer's needs. An unsuitable cloud solution can be a major disadvantage, wasting valuable resources, money and time.
The Visiongain report is designed to help businesses understand the cloud landscape. It advises on the advantages and benefits of the different deployment models and service offerings. The spate of vendors and providers can become overwhelming due to the nascent and fragmented nature of the current cloud market which is only now maturing. The report breaks down the market into understandable segments, allowing for a more comprehensive view of the current offers and the different vendors.
Contact: For more information on the report, "Cloud 2011: Moving into the Realm of an Essential IT Strategy," click here.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Majority Of Enterprises To Move To Hybrid Cloud By 2015
Sixty-six percent of enterprises plan to move to a hybrid cloud environment within the next four years, according to a study. A large majority plan to combine public cloud and private data centres to deliver business applications, rather than opting for a cloud only (17 percent) or private data centre only approach (17 percent).
Results also highlight trends in cloud networking, delivery, adoption and barriers to adoption:
Networking in the cloud
To support the hybrid cloud model over 63 percent of businesses surveyed plan to use a mixture of traditional MPLS-based corporate networks and cost-effective IP-VPNs. With almost 70 percent of companies citing cost reduction as the primary driver for selecting a cloud project, moving to a hybrid networking strategy emerges as a popular route to control IT budgets.
Cloud delivery
Despite the increased complexity associated with adopting a hybrid networking model, surprisingly over 50 percent of companies plan to deploy and manage their on-going cloud program themselves, using their own IT department. Just 31 percent plan to outsource this process to external service providers to manage with the remainder not planning to adopt the cloud.
Cloud adoption and barriers to adoption
By the end of 2012 50 percent of companies are set to have a private cloud (completely virtualised central datacentre) in place. Almost a third have already implemented a private cloud with a further 20 percent expecting to have done so within the next two years. Security was seen as the primary barrier to cloud adoption with 58 percent of respondents believing security concerns prevented greater implementation. Performance of the cloud model was also viewed as a challenge with 39 percent of respondents viewing performance issues as a barrier to further adoption.
Comment from Beatrice Piquer, Marketing Director for Ipanema Technologies: From this research it's clear that a combination of cloud and private data centres is becoming the primary model for enterprise IT. The cloud can bring great benefits but a hybrid model will add complexity as applications are delivered from a variety of locations across different networks. IT leaders taking on this challenge need to view the WAN as a strategic asset and guarantee performance at the application level.
About the study: The research study of 150 enterprise CIOs and IT Directors was a collaboration between Ipanema Technologies and Orange Business Services to understand the objectives and challenges companies face as they move to the cloud.
Contact: http://www.ipanematech.com
Results also highlight trends in cloud networking, delivery, adoption and barriers to adoption:
Networking in the cloud
To support the hybrid cloud model over 63 percent of businesses surveyed plan to use a mixture of traditional MPLS-based corporate networks and cost-effective IP-VPNs. With almost 70 percent of companies citing cost reduction as the primary driver for selecting a cloud project, moving to a hybrid networking strategy emerges as a popular route to control IT budgets.
Cloud delivery
Despite the increased complexity associated with adopting a hybrid networking model, surprisingly over 50 percent of companies plan to deploy and manage their on-going cloud program themselves, using their own IT department. Just 31 percent plan to outsource this process to external service providers to manage with the remainder not planning to adopt the cloud.
Cloud adoption and barriers to adoption
By the end of 2012 50 percent of companies are set to have a private cloud (completely virtualised central datacentre) in place. Almost a third have already implemented a private cloud with a further 20 percent expecting to have done so within the next two years. Security was seen as the primary barrier to cloud adoption with 58 percent of respondents believing security concerns prevented greater implementation. Performance of the cloud model was also viewed as a challenge with 39 percent of respondents viewing performance issues as a barrier to further adoption.
Comment from Beatrice Piquer, Marketing Director for Ipanema Technologies: From this research it's clear that a combination of cloud and private data centres is becoming the primary model for enterprise IT. The cloud can bring great benefits but a hybrid model will add complexity as applications are delivered from a variety of locations across different networks. IT leaders taking on this challenge need to view the WAN as a strategic asset and guarantee performance at the application level.
About the study: The research study of 150 enterprise CIOs and IT Directors was a collaboration between Ipanema Technologies and Orange Business Services to understand the objectives and challenges companies face as they move to the cloud.
Contact: http://www.ipanematech.com
Government Adoption of Cloud Computing Increases, Despite Security Concerns
Security remains the single biggest concern of government information technology decision-makers when it comes to cloud computing, a survey has found. However, despite these security concerns, 50% are now considering cloud applications for their agencies, versus only 12% a year ago.
Two-thirds of participants cited security as the most important element in their evaluations. At the same time, those more familiar with cloud computing are more than twice as likely to trust it, 57 percent versus 24 percent. Concerns about security are not the only obstacle holding back federal agencies from moving to the cloud. At least three-quarters of participants identified dependability, availability, and the ability to continue using existing applications as elements that cloud-based solutions must address. Meanwhile, more than one-quarter of participants identified mission-critical data management, procurement, and financial management systems as applications they would never consider moving to the cloud.
Comment from Lockheed Martin's Curt Aubley, Vice President for Cyber Security and NexGen innovation: The government is making strides in transitioning to the cloud and we believe an intelligence driven cyber security approach, and asking the penetrating questions regarding cloud governance, availability, and reliability are key to prudent adoption. Security concerns are the single biggest reason agencies cite for their slow adoption of cloud. There's a lot of hype in the industry.
Comment from Cynthia Poole, research director at Market Connections: One major takeaway is that nearly one-third of participants agreed that cloud-based computing is a good solution for all data and applications, which indicates that if security concerns can be addressed successfully, the cloud would be embraced wholeheartedly by a number of agencies.
About the survey: The study funded by the Lockheed Martin Cyber Security Alliance and conducted by Market Connections included in-depth interviews and an online survey. It explored comfort levels, cloud engagement, elements of importance and plans for cloud application migration among U.S. federal government, defense/military, and intelligence agency technology decision-makers and IT contractors serving the federal government. Study findings reflect input from 196 participants from all military branches and a variety of federal civilian agencies.
Contact: http://www.lockheedmartin.com
Two-thirds of participants cited security as the most important element in their evaluations. At the same time, those more familiar with cloud computing are more than twice as likely to trust it, 57 percent versus 24 percent. Concerns about security are not the only obstacle holding back federal agencies from moving to the cloud. At least three-quarters of participants identified dependability, availability, and the ability to continue using existing applications as elements that cloud-based solutions must address. Meanwhile, more than one-quarter of participants identified mission-critical data management, procurement, and financial management systems as applications they would never consider moving to the cloud.
Comment from Lockheed Martin's Curt Aubley, Vice President for Cyber Security and NexGen innovation: The government is making strides in transitioning to the cloud and we believe an intelligence driven cyber security approach, and asking the penetrating questions regarding cloud governance, availability, and reliability are key to prudent adoption. Security concerns are the single biggest reason agencies cite for their slow adoption of cloud. There's a lot of hype in the industry.
Comment from Cynthia Poole, research director at Market Connections: One major takeaway is that nearly one-third of participants agreed that cloud-based computing is a good solution for all data and applications, which indicates that if security concerns can be addressed successfully, the cloud would be embraced wholeheartedly by a number of agencies.
About the survey: The study funded by the Lockheed Martin Cyber Security Alliance and conducted by Market Connections included in-depth interviews and an online survey. It explored comfort levels, cloud engagement, elements of importance and plans for cloud application migration among U.S. federal government, defense/military, and intelligence agency technology decision-makers and IT contractors serving the federal government. Study findings reflect input from 196 participants from all military branches and a variety of federal civilian agencies.
Contact: http://www.lockheedmartin.com
Majority Of IT Security Professionals Are Likely To Use FISMA Or PCI Compliant Cloud Vendor
A survey of IT security professionals has found that 69 percent would be more likely to consider cloud vendors that are PCI or FISMA compliant, compared with 63 percent in 2010.
Other findings:
-- Only 32 percent of companies believe the cost savings associated with cloud computing outweigh security considerations for their organization, up from 26 percent in 2010
-- 69 percent of companies are considering cloud computing, up from 66 percent in 2010
Comment from Tim Keanini, CTO for nCircle: These results are a clear indication that there is demand for specific and tangible assurance of security and compliance measures from cloud vendors. IT security professionals are informed buyers. They know that cloud vendors currently produce very little evidence of their internal security and compliance processes and do not allow their customers to conduct their own security and compliance audits.
About the survey: The nCircle survey (2011 Information Cloud Computing Study) polled 551 IT security senior management, IT operations, security professionals and risk and audit managers.The survey was conducted between March 17 and March 25, 2011, and covered a range of security topics.
Contact: Download a copy of the study here.
Contact: http://www.ncircle.com
Other findings:
-- Only 32 percent of companies believe the cost savings associated with cloud computing outweigh security considerations for their organization, up from 26 percent in 2010
-- 69 percent of companies are considering cloud computing, up from 66 percent in 2010
Comment from Tim Keanini, CTO for nCircle: These results are a clear indication that there is demand for specific and tangible assurance of security and compliance measures from cloud vendors. IT security professionals are informed buyers. They know that cloud vendors currently produce very little evidence of their internal security and compliance processes and do not allow their customers to conduct their own security and compliance audits.
About the survey: The nCircle survey (2011 Information Cloud Computing Study) polled 551 IT security senior management, IT operations, security professionals and risk and audit managers.The survey was conducted between March 17 and March 25, 2011, and covered a range of security topics.
Contact: Download a copy of the study here.
Contact: http://www.ncircle.com
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
New Era Of Consumer-Driven IT Arrives
The consumerization of IT across enterprise scale IT organizations has reached a tipping point where mainstream IT organizations are recognizing that they can no longer ignore the transformational impact of consumer technologies in the enterprise, a study has found.
While the consumerization of IT creates many new opportunities, including increased employee productivity, improved customer interactions, and faster and more agile business operations and decision making, it also results in significant IT management and security challenges.
Widespread consumer adoption of the cloud is here, with cloud-based applications and social networking becoming the norm. The adoption of these services is ushering in a new era of consumer driven IT, where CIOs are facing tremendous pressure to satisfy the pervasive and real-time demand for data and services from business users within their organizations. The cloud is enabling enterprises to be more agile, offering organizations the opportunity to innovate in their product or services offerings. The days of the CI "No" are over, as the new generation of workers and customers are demanding an "always-on, always connected" experience. While new opportunities are clearly emerging, so are the risks. The need for reliable IT management and security solutions across all environments, specifically virtual and cloud, are become increasingly important to ensure that this next generation of IT is successful.
Consumer use of smartphones, social networks and cloud services are fundamentally changing the way that enterprises do business.
The study found that different IT decision makers are using different tactics to address these rapid fire changes in their customer and employee expectations. One group of thought leaders, representing 19 percent of the total sample of IT decision makers surveyed, was found to be particularly proactive in getting ahead of the curve of consumer driven IT. This group generally emphasizes the need for the IT organization to work closely with business unit decision makers to aggressively integrate consumer technologies into a wide range of customer facing programs and internal business initiatives.
This group of "leaders" can be contrasted with more "mainstream" organizations that described themselves as market followers or ones that preferred to let business decision makers lead the charge without assistance from the IT team, in that they tend to be father along in exploiting the potential advantages of IT consumerization.
The research indicates these proactive leaders are more likely to realize greater benefits from the investments they are making to proactively addressing the consumerization of IT.
For example:
-- 45 percent report they are experiencing improved customer satisfaction and loyalty by using social networks and rich media, compared to 31 percent of the mainstream group.
32 percent say they are seeing increased market share due to their use of social networks and rich media, compared to 20 percent of the mainstream group.
32 percent note they are seeing greater penetration into new geographies, compared to 20 percent of the mainstream group.
Similarly, these proactive leaders are experiencing significant benefits from the use of public cloud services. Specifically, among the 616 organizations in the survey that are using public cloud services:
-- 45 percent are reporting they are able to reduce IT staff, FTEs and/or training expenses using public cloud services, versus 35 percent of mainstream organizations.
-- 36 percent are seeing improved competitive positioning from their use of public cloud services, compared to 28 percent of the mainstream sample.
-- 36 percent see an improved ability to deal with spikes in demand using public cloud services, compared to 26 percent of mainstream organizations.
-- 33 percent experience better end-to-end application performance from using public cloud services, compared to 24 percent of mainstream organizations.
While these trends were consistent around the world, the survey did show some international variability. For example, among U.S. based IT decision makers currently using public cloud services, 42 percent said they were seeing reductions in IT staff expenses, FTEs, and/or training costs, compared to 37 percent of the total sample (including the U.S. respondents).
Comment from Crawford Del Prete, IDC's Chief Research Officer: Today's CIOs have an opportunity to lead both business and IT innovation as they help their organizations decide how to best exploit the trend towards consumerization and personalization of IT. CIOs are being called upon to do more than just maintain IT operations behind the firewall. In the face of rapid and intense consumerization of IT, CIOs are being called upon to work closely with business decision makers to create safe, secure, well-managed environments that allow the company to communicate and collaborate with customers and employees anytime, anywhere. CIOs need to lead the charge in order to ensure that customers are engaged, confidential data is protected, employee productivity is enabled, and the enterprise is getting the greatest return possible on every IT dollar it spends. The experience of these proactive leaders shows that IT and business collaboration is critical in order for CIOs to cost effectively and proactively manage, control and secure their IT environments at a time when mobility, personalization, cloud and social media are rapidly shifting business requirements.
About the study: The IDC study ("IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise: Are You Ready?") was sponsored by CA Technologies and is based on two global surveys plus a focus group of IT executives, all of which were conducted in March-and April, 2011. IDC surveyed 804 IT executives from organizations of over $1 billion in revenue with responsibility for or influence over their organization's strategy for public cloud, social, and mobile initiatives. A separate survey consisted of 1,040 IT consumers who use public cloud, smart mobile devices, and/or social networks for personal or business purposes. To qualify, respondents had to be fully employed, over 17 years of age, and use a PC or other mobile device for personal and/or work purposes.
Contact: http://www.CA.com
While the consumerization of IT creates many new opportunities, including increased employee productivity, improved customer interactions, and faster and more agile business operations and decision making, it also results in significant IT management and security challenges.
Widespread consumer adoption of the cloud is here, with cloud-based applications and social networking becoming the norm. The adoption of these services is ushering in a new era of consumer driven IT, where CIOs are facing tremendous pressure to satisfy the pervasive and real-time demand for data and services from business users within their organizations. The cloud is enabling enterprises to be more agile, offering organizations the opportunity to innovate in their product or services offerings. The days of the CI "No" are over, as the new generation of workers and customers are demanding an "always-on, always connected" experience. While new opportunities are clearly emerging, so are the risks. The need for reliable IT management and security solutions across all environments, specifically virtual and cloud, are become increasingly important to ensure that this next generation of IT is successful.
Consumer use of smartphones, social networks and cloud services are fundamentally changing the way that enterprises do business.
The study found that different IT decision makers are using different tactics to address these rapid fire changes in their customer and employee expectations. One group of thought leaders, representing 19 percent of the total sample of IT decision makers surveyed, was found to be particularly proactive in getting ahead of the curve of consumer driven IT. This group generally emphasizes the need for the IT organization to work closely with business unit decision makers to aggressively integrate consumer technologies into a wide range of customer facing programs and internal business initiatives.
This group of "leaders" can be contrasted with more "mainstream" organizations that described themselves as market followers or ones that preferred to let business decision makers lead the charge without assistance from the IT team, in that they tend to be father along in exploiting the potential advantages of IT consumerization.
The research indicates these proactive leaders are more likely to realize greater benefits from the investments they are making to proactively addressing the consumerization of IT.
For example:
-- 45 percent report they are experiencing improved customer satisfaction and loyalty by using social networks and rich media, compared to 31 percent of the mainstream group.
32 percent say they are seeing increased market share due to their use of social networks and rich media, compared to 20 percent of the mainstream group.
32 percent note they are seeing greater penetration into new geographies, compared to 20 percent of the mainstream group.
Similarly, these proactive leaders are experiencing significant benefits from the use of public cloud services. Specifically, among the 616 organizations in the survey that are using public cloud services:
-- 45 percent are reporting they are able to reduce IT staff, FTEs and/or training expenses using public cloud services, versus 35 percent of mainstream organizations.
-- 36 percent are seeing improved competitive positioning from their use of public cloud services, compared to 28 percent of the mainstream sample.
-- 36 percent see an improved ability to deal with spikes in demand using public cloud services, compared to 26 percent of mainstream organizations.
-- 33 percent experience better end-to-end application performance from using public cloud services, compared to 24 percent of mainstream organizations.
While these trends were consistent around the world, the survey did show some international variability. For example, among U.S. based IT decision makers currently using public cloud services, 42 percent said they were seeing reductions in IT staff expenses, FTEs, and/or training costs, compared to 37 percent of the total sample (including the U.S. respondents).
Comment from Crawford Del Prete, IDC's Chief Research Officer: Today's CIOs have an opportunity to lead both business and IT innovation as they help their organizations decide how to best exploit the trend towards consumerization and personalization of IT. CIOs are being called upon to do more than just maintain IT operations behind the firewall. In the face of rapid and intense consumerization of IT, CIOs are being called upon to work closely with business decision makers to create safe, secure, well-managed environments that allow the company to communicate and collaborate with customers and employees anytime, anywhere. CIOs need to lead the charge in order to ensure that customers are engaged, confidential data is protected, employee productivity is enabled, and the enterprise is getting the greatest return possible on every IT dollar it spends. The experience of these proactive leaders shows that IT and business collaboration is critical in order for CIOs to cost effectively and proactively manage, control and secure their IT environments at a time when mobility, personalization, cloud and social media are rapidly shifting business requirements.
About the study: The IDC study ("IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise: Are You Ready?") was sponsored by CA Technologies and is based on two global surveys plus a focus group of IT executives, all of which were conducted in March-and April, 2011. IDC surveyed 804 IT executives from organizations of over $1 billion in revenue with responsibility for or influence over their organization's strategy for public cloud, social, and mobile initiatives. A separate survey consisted of 1,040 IT consumers who use public cloud, smart mobile devices, and/or social networks for personal or business purposes. To qualify, respondents had to be fully employed, over 17 years of age, and use a PC or other mobile device for personal and/or work purposes.
Contact: http://www.CA.com
Massive Data Growth Drives Backup And Recovery Concerns
There is a growing concern in enterprise data centers about their ability to adequately protect massive data volumes and increasingly complex environments, according to a survey of large enterprises. Unabated data growth continues to be the most significant data protection challenge. Large enterprises are increasingly focusing on protecting data in branch locations and in implementing more effective disaster recovery solutions.
Other findings:
-- Enterprises continue to face the challenges of protecting enormous data volumes and handling rapid data growth. Data growth continues unabated with more than one third of respondents reported that their data was growing by more than thirty percent annually. The number of respondents that reported having greater than thirty percent annual growth increased from twenty-eight percent of respondents in 2010 to thirty-three percent of respondents in 2011.
-- Data centers now face a growing challenge of "sprawl" as they add more and more systems to handle data growth. Seventy percent have had to add a disk-based data protection system to scale their backup performance or capacity in the last twenty-four months. Additional systems are adding hours of administrative burden to IT staff.
-- IT administration and staff time is at a premium. Seventy-four percent of enterprise respondents felt their organization fell short on data protection. The majority (thirty-five percent) cited that "team is understaffed" as the primary reason.
-- Disaster protection and enterprise branch office data protection are significant and increasingly growing concerns. "Data will be unrecoverable in the event of a disaster" was rated as the greatest backup/data protection fear. This fear was also evident in responses to "How well does your current disaster recovery (DR) testing prepare you for a real disaster?" as fifty-seven percent scored moderately or poorly. "File Replication" and "Reporting on Application Recovery/Replication Integrity" also scored as high spending priorities.
-- Enterprises are still using physical tape libraries despite initiatives to move to disk. Fifty-two percent of respondents are using physical tape to protect data in their enterprise branch offices.
-- Disaster recovery reporting is rated most frequently as the critical IT spending priority for 2011/2012.
-- Migrating to new technologies is both a wish and a fear. It rated third among stated fears that it would lead to disruption. However, it was also mentioned frequently in free form answers as a desire.
-- Public cloud services are being used for selected application requirements more than private cloud.
Comment from Joe Forgione, senior vice president, product operations and business development, Sepaton, Inc.: The tremendous volume of data that is already being protected by enterprises is growing rapidly. The number of respondents that reported having greater than thirty percent annual data growth increased from twenty-eight percent in 2010 to thirty-three percent in 2011. As a result, large enterprises experiencing massive data growth are eager to adopt data protection platforms that are specifically designed to address their requirements to simply and cost effectively scale performance and capacity independently in a single unified platform.
About the survey: Sepaton conducted the annual survey of large enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50 terabytes of primary data to protect. The survey was conducted in Q2 2011 and elicited responses from 581 IT professional across North America and Europe of which 168 met criteria for large enterprise. The objective of the survey was to quantify current data protection and disaster protection challenges for enterprise data centers.
Contact: http://www.sepaton.com
Other findings:
-- Enterprises continue to face the challenges of protecting enormous data volumes and handling rapid data growth. Data growth continues unabated with more than one third of respondents reported that their data was growing by more than thirty percent annually. The number of respondents that reported having greater than thirty percent annual growth increased from twenty-eight percent of respondents in 2010 to thirty-three percent of respondents in 2011.
-- Data centers now face a growing challenge of "sprawl" as they add more and more systems to handle data growth. Seventy percent have had to add a disk-based data protection system to scale their backup performance or capacity in the last twenty-four months. Additional systems are adding hours of administrative burden to IT staff.
-- IT administration and staff time is at a premium. Seventy-four percent of enterprise respondents felt their organization fell short on data protection. The majority (thirty-five percent) cited that "team is understaffed" as the primary reason.
-- Disaster protection and enterprise branch office data protection are significant and increasingly growing concerns. "Data will be unrecoverable in the event of a disaster" was rated as the greatest backup/data protection fear. This fear was also evident in responses to "How well does your current disaster recovery (DR) testing prepare you for a real disaster?" as fifty-seven percent scored moderately or poorly. "File Replication" and "Reporting on Application Recovery/Replication Integrity" also scored as high spending priorities.
-- Enterprises are still using physical tape libraries despite initiatives to move to disk. Fifty-two percent of respondents are using physical tape to protect data in their enterprise branch offices.
-- Disaster recovery reporting is rated most frequently as the critical IT spending priority for 2011/2012.
-- Migrating to new technologies is both a wish and a fear. It rated third among stated fears that it would lead to disruption. However, it was also mentioned frequently in free form answers as a desire.
-- Public cloud services are being used for selected application requirements more than private cloud.
Comment from Joe Forgione, senior vice president, product operations and business development, Sepaton, Inc.: The tremendous volume of data that is already being protected by enterprises is growing rapidly. The number of respondents that reported having greater than thirty percent annual data growth increased from twenty-eight percent in 2010 to thirty-three percent in 2011. As a result, large enterprises experiencing massive data growth are eager to adopt data protection platforms that are specifically designed to address their requirements to simply and cost effectively scale performance and capacity independently in a single unified platform.
About the survey: Sepaton conducted the annual survey of large enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50 terabytes of primary data to protect. The survey was conducted in Q2 2011 and elicited responses from 581 IT professional across North America and Europe of which 168 met criteria for large enterprise. The objective of the survey was to quantify current data protection and disaster protection challenges for enterprise data centers.
Contact: http://www.sepaton.com
Cloud Storage Gains Traction Among SMBs
The proliferation of hackers, natural disasters and unstable market conditions are all significant drivers for small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. to seek backup/storage for their company's data and email in the cloud, according to new research.
Pressure to reduce costs, improve flexibility, and maintain privacy of sensitive data also lures SMBs to invest in cloud storage.
Furthermore, for mobile SMB employees, cloud storage is an attractive tool for backing-up and storing data while on the go. 31 percent of the one million U.S. SMBs using hosted storage have mobile employees. The market for hosted storage will increase by 11 percent yearly (CAGR) through 2015, to $270 million.
Comment from Nichelle Grannum, Survey Research Analyst at AMI: Many U.S. SMBs are moving to the cloud to enhance existing packaged applications, such as CRM databases. Cloud storage provides these companies with the latest storage technology realizing a significant reduction in IT overhead due to decreased investment in physical storage devices on their premises. Hosted storage also allows companies to subscribe based on their storage capacity requirements and desired backup schedule, coupled with the benefit of a flexible payment schedule. Since companies need only to pay for the storage they actually use, hosting costs can be tightly controlled. Responsibility for storage maintenance tasks, such as backup, data replication, and storage software updates are entrusted to the service provider, allowing SMBs to focus on their core business.
For cloud storage U.S. SMBs prefer private servers as opposed to public or hybrid ones.
Company data is constantly changing and growing in volume, thus moving storage to the cloud gives companies greater storage capacity and flexibility at a lower cost. With the influx of smartphones and tablets, cloud storage will become increasingly more critical in providing an easily accessible, yet secure place to backup and retrieve company data.
About the study: AMI's 2011 U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook -- Strategic and Tactical GTM Planning Guide provides a tactical framework for architecting cloud-based services offerings to meet the growing demand for cloud services "bundles" and a perspective on cloud-related dynamics shaping up in the SMB space.
Contact: http://www.ami-partners.com
Pressure to reduce costs, improve flexibility, and maintain privacy of sensitive data also lures SMBs to invest in cloud storage.
Furthermore, for mobile SMB employees, cloud storage is an attractive tool for backing-up and storing data while on the go. 31 percent of the one million U.S. SMBs using hosted storage have mobile employees. The market for hosted storage will increase by 11 percent yearly (CAGR) through 2015, to $270 million.
Comment from Nichelle Grannum, Survey Research Analyst at AMI: Many U.S. SMBs are moving to the cloud to enhance existing packaged applications, such as CRM databases. Cloud storage provides these companies with the latest storage technology realizing a significant reduction in IT overhead due to decreased investment in physical storage devices on their premises. Hosted storage also allows companies to subscribe based on their storage capacity requirements and desired backup schedule, coupled with the benefit of a flexible payment schedule. Since companies need only to pay for the storage they actually use, hosting costs can be tightly controlled. Responsibility for storage maintenance tasks, such as backup, data replication, and storage software updates are entrusted to the service provider, allowing SMBs to focus on their core business.
For cloud storage U.S. SMBs prefer private servers as opposed to public or hybrid ones.
Company data is constantly changing and growing in volume, thus moving storage to the cloud gives companies greater storage capacity and flexibility at a lower cost. With the influx of smartphones and tablets, cloud storage will become increasingly more critical in providing an easily accessible, yet secure place to backup and retrieve company data.
About the study: AMI's 2011 U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook -- Strategic and Tactical GTM Planning Guide provides a tactical framework for architecting cloud-based services offerings to meet the growing demand for cloud services "bundles" and a perspective on cloud-related dynamics shaping up in the SMB space.
Contact: http://www.ami-partners.com
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