The cloud has been on a continuous ascent since Google CEO Eric Schmidt first threw the term and concept around at a 2006 industry conference. It seems every day another esteemed personage talks up the cloud as the greatest thing in tech since the personal computer. For example, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said, “Cloud computing is a better way to run your business.” While the fact that Benioff is worth north of $4 billion might be more impressive than anything he could ever say, his opinion about the cloud counts for a great deal. It certainly lends legitimacy to the idea that the cloud is here to stay.
RightScale survey
In RightScale‘s sixth annual State of the Cloud survey, 1,002 IT professionals were asked about their adoption of cloud infrastructure and related technologies. Among the findings:
- 85 per cent of companies now have a multi-cloud strategy
- Companies run 79 per cent of workloads in the cloud — 41 per cent public, 38 per cent private
- Enterprises run 75 per cent of workloads in the cloud — 43 per cent private, 32 per cent public
- SMBs run 83 per cent of workloads in the cloud — 50 per cent public, 33 per cent private
What does this survey tell us? For one, it tells us that cloud has arrived. The vague concept of “the cloud” from just ten years ago has become something of a paradigm shifter. Business entities have come on board en masse and are now, in one way or another, in the cloud.
What the above survey results also tells us is that business entities are adopting the cloud in different ways. In simple terms, the cloud is not an either/or proposition. Businesses are not moving their entire information systems but rather are migrating to a combination of traditional data centre and cloud technologies.
Right cloud mix
Most companies no longer want to invest in new and existing data centre facilities. In fact, research shows that there were fewer corporate-run data centres in 2016 than there were in 2014, and that there was a 7.5 per cent reduction in net data centre floor-space over that span. Canadian data centres are getting older (7.2 years old on average, 40%+ more than 10 years old), and are now being upgraded and/or expanded less frequently than in the past.
Despite this, the demands on data centres continue to rise, with data generated from corporate systems, mobile devices, and IoT networks continuing to grow by half every year. Companies, now running deep into the digital era, are facing challenges around not only capacity, performance and resiliency but also resources and security. They are looking to shift a considerable chunk of their burden to the cloud.
Carbon60, a managed cloud hosting service provider and one of the “major players” within the market.
To download the IDC MarketScape excerpt, click here.
To read a case study about how dentalcorp successfully repatriated and migrated patient data to Canada, click here.
To read a case study about how Carbon60 delivered a secure hybrid cloud platform for global collaboration, click here.
To see how Carbon60 fares among Canada’s data centre operations and management vendors, click here.