Report: Cloud now mission critical

The number of organisations resisting putting mission critical applications on cloud infrastructure is falling, according to research.

The report, commissioned by North Bridge Venture Partners, found that acceptance of cloud computing for critical business applications is growing with 50 per cent of respondents confident that cloud solutions are viable for mission such use.

The Future of Cloud Computing Survey, which questioned more than 700 respondents spanning industry experts, users and vendors, found that scalability remained the top reason for adopting the cloud. Indeed some 57 per cent of companies identifyied it as the most important driver for cloud adoption. Business agility ranked second among drivers for cloud adoption, with 54 per cent of respondents focused on this area.

However, security continued to be a key obstacle to adoption of cloud with 55 per cent of respondents identifying it as a concern, followed by regulatory compliance (38 per cent) and vendor lock-in (32 per cent).

The main type of cloud investment is expected to be SaaS with 82 per cent of respondents citing it as in use today, and 88 per cent expecting to use it five years from now.

The research also found that PaaS and IaaS would see significant growth in the next five years, with PaaS growing from 40 per cent to 72 per cent and IaaS growing from 51 per cent to 66 per cent.

The top three areas where cloud is impacting the most are backup and archiving (43 per cent), business continuity (25 per cent), collaboration tools (22 per cent), and big data processing (19 per cent).

Michael Skok, partner, North Bridge Venture Partners said that companies are growing increasingly confident in the cloud. 

“While agility and scalability continue to be primary drivers for cloud adoption, IT decision makers are beginning to trust the cloud with more mission-critical applications like eCommerce,” he said.

He added that identification of 'cloud formations' around the hottest business trends including big data and analytics by both vendors and IT decision makers alike highlights new opportunities for cloud. 

Analysts said that there is growing familiarity and trust of public cloud accompanied by a desire to move beyond one's own internal infrastructure.

“This is an understandable trend as the public cloud has existed for some time, presented enough options and has had time to progress from test or POC deployments to production implementations, which is reinforced by other responses,” said Jay Lyman, senior analyst at the 451 Group.