The primary reasons that companies
are turning to cloud services include reductions to capital and operational
expenditure, cost savings, increased business agility, and the ability to
deliver IT on-demand. These are among the key findings in the latest Frost
& Sullivan report, State of Cloud Computing in Australia:
2011.

 

Hybrid cloud deployments are the most popular model in Australia
having been adopted by 22 percent of total enterprises and by more than 50
percent of current cloud users.   This compares to 18 percent of
organisations using public clouds.  

 

Frost & Sullivan expects hybrid
clouds to remain the dominant deployment model in the near term due to the
flexibility offered to choose the right cloud environment based on cost,
security, reliability and service level agreements.

Most customers are struggling to understand the differences between a private
cloud and virtualised infrastructure or between private cloud and datacentre as
a service.  With a lack of clear metrics on usage measurement and asset
ownership, this confusion is likely to persist in the short-term.

When it comes to delivery of cloud services the decade-old
software-as-a-service model continues to lead the way, having been adopted by
72 percent of cloud users.   Infrastructure-as-a-service which
delivers compute and storage on a utility basis, has seen rapid take-up in the
past 12 months with almost half of cloud users adopting this model.
Platform-as-a-service remains in the early stages of adoption.

The major cloud services providers include Microsoft, Google, IBM, VMware,
Amazon, HP, Cisco, Rackspace and Telstra, all of whom enjoy a high brand recall
in an increasingly crowded market segment.

Enterprises will continue to be cautious about the type of workloads that they
move to the cloud, performing rigorous risk-benefit analysis before doing so.
Compute-as-a-service for test and development work, storage for the purposes of
business continuity planning or disaster recovery, email and email filtering
are some of the workloads expected to rapidly move to the cloud. Expect greater
hesitation with custom applications, sensitive storage data and production
environments.

Server virtualisation and network security will be the enablers that underpin
investments in private clouds.

Spending on cloud will increase but in a measured manner.  All IT decision
makers will either maintain or increase their spending on cloud computing in
the current fiscal year. Nevertheless, customers will continue to be cautious
about the upfront cost savings from cloud computing due to concerns over hidden
costs and downtime.

IT departments will continue to be the biggest influencers in cloud-related
decisions but more CXOs will either influence the IT department or will get
involved in decisions relating to cloud. Also, while some visionary IT managers
see cloud as a means of freeing them from performing mundane IT administrative
tasks, there is still inherent fear about the impact of cloud computing on IT
employment.

There has been a significant increase in the use of cloud services in Australia in
the past 12 months and all the indications are that this will continue.
While a formal cloud first” policy does not exist yet in most
enterprises, the idea of a cloud alternative” evaluation is increasingly
common. We expect to see a number of trial deployments this year as companies
dip their toes in the water and test non-mission critical applications and
infrastructure,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, research director – ICT Practice,
Frost & Sullivan.

By TelecomLead.com Team

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