Cloud Adoption Grows as More Enterprises Enter the Cloud

By Patrick Burke, Rackspace Hosting

There’s no doubt cloud is big business, and it’s finding its way into a growing number of enterprises.

By 2016, public IT cloud services will account for 16 percent of IT revenue in five technology categories: applications, system infrastructure software, platform as a service (PaaS), servers and basic storage, according to research firm IDC. And equally important, cloud services will generate 41 percent of all growth in these categories by 2016.

“The IT industry is in the midst of an important transformative period as companies invest in the technologies that will drive growth and innovation over the next two to three decades,” Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, said in a statement. “By the end of the decade, IDC expects at least 80 percent of the industry’s growth, and enterprises’ highest-value leverage of IT, will be driven by cloud services and the other third-platform technologies.”

IDC defines public IT cloud services as offerings designed for, and commercially offered to, a largely unrestricted marketplace of potential users. The forecast does not include revenue from private cloud deployments, which are dedicated to a specific customer.

Yet the availability of both private and public cloud infrastructure enables customers who want to run some workloads on an internal, or private cloud, and others on an external cloud to do so using the same infrastructure.

There’s big interest and considerable demand for such hybrid cloud implementations that let companies keep sensitive workloads inside their firewalls but allows easy expansion into a public cloud as needed, according to an article on GigaOm.

OneID is one such company.

Rackspace customer OneID provides a secure way for users to make payments online. Bobby Beckmann, vice president of engineering at OneID, strongly supports the idea of a hybrid cloud.

In a recent interview with GigaOm, he said he loves what cloud can do — let you spin up machines for fast, on-demand CPU power. But “I wasn’t ready to give up control over our speed of accessing storage,” he said. “I also wanted my own real hardware load balancer and firewall. We need to be PCI compliant and to do that we need tight control over devices.”

Rackspace recently released Rackspace Private Cloud Software, offering organizations a free download of the same complete version of Essex OpenStack that the company runs in its own hosted private clouds.

The Rackspace Private Cloud Software consists of Rackspace’s Chef-configured version of OpenStack, which is 100 percent open-source Essex.

Rackspace and other members of the OpenStack community just reached a major milestone: They have announced the formal launch of the new OpenStack Foundation to continue to promote the development and adoption of the open-source OpenStack cloud software.

The Foundation secured $10 million in funding and has 5,600 members.

”As a driving force behind OpenStack, Rackspace helped grow the community to where it is today, and now with the amazing support from more than 180 member companies, the Foundation is ready to take flight,” said Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace, which co-founded the OpenStack project, in a statement.

Patrick Burke is a writer and editor based in the greater New York area and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.