Cloud Services Go For The Grand Slam

In sports, the hunt for October is heating up; but in tech, the competition is in the cloud. And if cloud computing were a pitcher, he'd be throwing no-hitters and have the Cy Young award in his sights this season, according to one provider. 

Based on the results of Evolve IP’s 2014 survey of 1250 IT cloud decision makers, the trek to the cloud continues with organizations planning on offloading their infrastructure, applications, and workloads. In addition, respondents are seeing fewer hurdles and have more confidence in the cloud than in the results of the same survey last year. That may be wishfil thinking, since Evolve IP is a cloud integrator, but it's also important to note that the company removed its customers from the survey pool.

Cloud seems to have achieved almost universal acceptance, with nine out of 10 respondents saying they believe that cloud computing is the future model of IT. Sixty-seven percent identified themselves as "cloud believers," while only 19% remained "unconvinced." Just 13% said they needed more information before they could form an opinion.

When it came to existing deployments, 81% of respondents had deployed at least one service in the cloud, with an average of 2.7 services per business. Even 64% of those that had labeled themselves "unconvinced" had an average of 1.4 services in the cloud. The most popular services were servers/data centers, Microsoft Exchange, and colocation/backup.

It appears IT departments are also overcoming the "cloud skills gap." Fifty-eight percent of respondents said their staff would be able to "implement a cloud strategy independently," with a relatively small 29% indicating that lack of knowledge was a barrier to cloud migration. For current cloud services, 43.5% had handled the process themselves, while 56.5% used a third party for implementation. Of those who managed the process themselves, 24% said they would use a third party the next time.

Drilling down into the details of the hypervisor used, a whopping 82.5% of respondents chose VMware ESX, followed by 26% on Citrix Xen, and only 6% on KVM.

Do your cloud experiences mirror these survey results? Take a look and let's hit the dugout!