We've all seen the vendor hype about organizations moving to the cloud in droves in the name of cost savings, management simplicity, and other cloudy goodness. But are companies really eschewing traditional server rooms and data centers and taking the plunge in the still-nascent cloud space? According to separate research from Gartner and The Uptime Institute, the short answer is yes, tempered with a generous "but."
The combined reports illustrate that cloud adoption is indeed on the rise across the globe, at companies both large and small, though American and European organizations are warier of the public cloud than are their Asian counterparts. Further, the companies building clouds tend to be service providers, telecom companies, and colos; that is, cloud deployment hasn't caught on as significantly in financial, manufacturing, health care, or other such industries.
Traditional enterprise may not be rolling out their own public clouds, but they are investing more heavily in cloud-based services. Gartner expects enterprise spending on public cloud services to grow from $91 billion worldwide in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012. By 2016, enterprise public cloud services spending will reach $207 billion.
"Business process as a service still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas like platform as a service, software as a service, and infrastructure as a service are growing faster," said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner.
According to Uptime's recently released 2012 Data Center Industry Survey, cloud deployments have significantly increased globally over the past year: In 2011, 16 percent of respondents said they'd deployed public clouds and 35 percent had deployed private clouds. For this year's survey, 25 percent said they're adopting public cloud and 30 percent said they were considering it. Another 49 percent said they were heading into the private cloud, while another 37 percent were considering it.
