This seems like an obvious headline but here is more data to support what seems intuitive. Computerworld recently provided the results of a survey of 1,358 CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld and Network World readers. This rise is slow however. Only a slightly higher percentage of respondents overall now say they will move a majority of their IT operations to the cloud within the next five years: 29% compared to 27% in 2012. This may be because the readers report that it remains difficult to demonstrate that the cloud actually lowers IT costs.
The use of public cloud services is growing. The percentage who say they will limit their cloud activity to private clouds (18%) or to using software as a service (7%) is declining. Large companies, with 1,000 or more employees, are somewhat more conservative about the public cloud than are small and mid-sized companies, with less than 1,000 employees. This makes sense, as the smaller companies do not want to invest in the infrastructure for private clouds. The majority of companies of all sizes (59%), are still working to identify IT operations that are candidates for cloud hosting.
Looking more closely, 69% of respondents report having data, applications or infrastructure deployed in a private cloud compared to 59% utilizing a public cloud. In addition, the average percentage of companies' IT environment in private clouds (28%) is double that in public clouds (14%). Looking ahead, the adoption of all three types of cloud models should rise during the next 18 months, and the gap between usage of private and public clouds, particularly, will likely narrow. The Computerworld survey respondents anticipate that by mid-2014, private clouds will encompass slightly more than one-third (36%) of their IT environment, while about 20% of the IT environment will be deployed in a public cloud.
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