the findings of an independent survey on the cloud adoption plans of
mid-to-large enterprises for unified communications (UC) services.
The research found that among
organizations not currently using a public cloud-based UC service, only 10
percent plan to deploy such a service within the next year citing concerns over
loss of customization, uptime, and security.
However, among those organizations
that cannot or would not deploy public cloud-based UC services, 48 percent said
they would deploy a private cloud as an alternative. Asked if they had to
choose a public-cloud UC provider, one-third said they would choose Microsoft
Office 365.
The report, entitled Cloud Realities
in the Age of Office 365, was conducted by Osterman Research. It summarizes the
findings of a survey of IT managers, directors, and CIOs on UC platforms they
currently have in place, their perceptions of public, private and hybrid cloud
deployments, plans for migrating UC to the cloud, and barriers to the adoption
of the cloud for UC.
This research revealed that larger
organizations are interested in the benefits associated with public cloud
Unified Communications – namely reduced management overhead, predictable cost
of ownership, and simpler migration to new services – but are concerned about
customization, uptime, and security. We were surprised to learn that among
organizations that said they could not or would not deploy public cloud-based
UC services, nearly one third indicated that if hybrid cloud UC solutions were
available they would migrate within the next 12 months,” said Michael Osterman,
president, Osterman Research.
While the survey found that the
majority of enterprises will continue to deploy UC (email, calendaring and
scheduling, voice/telephony, presence, Web conferencing, etc.) in on-premise
and/or private-cloud infrastructures over the next several years, the public
cloud-based messaging and collaboration market is slowly gaining popularity.
According to the Osterman Report,
public cloud Unified Communications services are not considered ready for prime
time by most mid-to-large enterprises. However, the survey did reveal that many
decision makers view private cloud UC infrastructures as superior to public
cloud options, based largely on their robust customization, flexibility, and
more mature security benefits,” said Scott Gode, vice president, product
management and marketing, Azaleos.
By Telecomlead.com Team
