2015 Cloud Considerations: Why Not Cloud?

Featured Article By Chalva Tchkotoua, NaviSite Group Vice President, Enterprise and Carrier Services Marketing

As we near the end of 2015, the cloud continues to dominate conversations among IT professionals. While cloud has maintained its relevance over the past couple of years, it is expected to become even more mainstream in 2015. The question among progressive IT departments will shift from “why cloud?” to “why not cloud?” This trend is driven by a number of factors, including the increasing prevalence of public, private and hybrid cloud models, as well as a growing awareness of how the cloud can be leveraged to streamline business operations.

Confidence in the Cloud

A recent Gartner survey of CIOs found that 55 percent of respondents indicated they would source all their critical apps in the cloud by 2020¹. In addition to cost-savings associated with the cloud, IT departments have come to experience lasting benefits by migrating to the cloud, including enhanced market responsiveness, competitiveness, business agility and more. In fact, a recent survey, commissioned by NaviSite, Inc., found that one-third of respondents said they’ve already migrated a significant amount (50-70 percent) of their IT infrastructure to the cloud, driven by their desire to improve reliability, uptime and also to offer improved service².

Growing confidence and sustained demand continues to drive adoption of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), with both private cloud and hybrid cloud services rising in popularity as we enter 2015. According to the NaviSite survey, 65 percent of U.S. respondents identified IaaS private cloud as one of their top priorities in the coming year, and consider a service provider’s ability to personalize solutions as a key criterion when seeking a technology partner².

Concerns in the Cloud

Although enterprise IT is becoming increasingly comfortable with the cloud, IT business leaders continue to harbor concerns when establishing the best IT approach for their organizations. Security and compliance remain key considerations for businesses when evaluating in-house and service provider options. The responses of nearly 100 percent of surveyed IT business leaders reflected some level of concern in securing enterprise data as part of their list of IT priorities, with nearly half (48 percent) citing it amongst their top three concerns².

The retail industry in particular is seeing a security “breach of the week” trend, with major players being compromised on a regular basis. IT departments across all industries are compelled to closely examine new and existing IT environments for vulnerabilities. In some cases, strict compliance regulations will force businesses to outsource the aspects of their organizations that deal with confidential information.

Additionally, security continues to be a key priority when enterprise organizations look at migrating IT workloads to either an IaaS model or when considering colocation services. While there is still anxiety surrounding cloud computing, maturation of the available service provider offerings – combined with evolving best practices – are resulting in widespread adoption.

Consumerization of the Cloud

Throughout the enterprise, mobility and the consumerization of IT have driven many companies to seek out hosted end-user computing solutions, such as Desktop-as a-Service (DaaS). 25 percent of surveyed IT business leaders said one of the primary considerations when evaluating DaaS solutions is the ability to secure corporate data while extending a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy to employees².

With the increasingly mobile workforce, BYOD can help unlock business benefits like increased productivity, reduced IT and operational costs, and seamless mobility across a broad set of end-point devices for employees. While BYOD has many added benefits, there are still considerations when implementing BYOD in the workplace. Among the barriers to implementation, IT leaders find themselves facing several key challenges, such as limited IT resources and skills, diverse platform and device preferences among employees and issues with executive buy-in. 56 percent of surveyed business leaders currently do not have a BYOD policy in place; however, implementing BYOD remains a priority, with nearly half of respondents citing they are looking to develop a policy over the next twelve months².

The discussion within enterprises has shifted past the initial cloud strategy to the groundwork of driving mainstream adoption and achieving the associated benefits around agility, cost, performance, and security. While enterprises have made significant headway towards realizing a cloud-enabled IT infrastructure, IT business leaders continue to face obstacles around security, compliance, and enabling workforce mobility that continue to remain top-of-mind for IT decision makers. Throughout 2015, these trends will help shape enterprises as they continue to realize the transformative capabilities found in the cloud.