Most organisations rank avoiding high start-up investment as one of the key drivers for adopting cloud technologies.
This was one of the main outtakes from the ITWeb Cloud Survey, which ran online for 14 days in November, attracting 102 responses.
"As expected, the high start-up cost reduction that cloud can provide ranks high in the survey. This is a huge benefit to SMEs, which can now be highly competitive and agile in a very short space of time. IT skills within a small organisation are a costly burden and this cost cannot always be justified based on the size of the business and the utilisation of the resource," says Fabio Taddei, architect for managed services at Fujitsu, commenting on the results.
According to the survey, 32.63% of respondents rated avoiding high start-up investment as one of the key drivers when adopting cloud technologies, while 31.58% cited the need for standardised and optimised infrastructure, and 26.32% cited a lack of resources or skills for IT infrastructure management.
"Having your infrastructure managed in a cloud environment once again frees up an organisation to concentrate on its core business and use IT as a tool," says Taddei.
When asked where cloud computing will add value to their organisations and IT operations, respondents indicated reduced costs (40%), simplified IT (32.63%), and the ability to move IT operations outside of the business (34.74%) as important areas.
"Cloud has always been driven by the promise of the reduction of cost. However, it is also clear from the survey results that the complexity and management of IT are also top-of-mind within these organisations. These organisations want to be able to focus on their key business areas and not evolve into IT companies in the process. Cloud is an ideal IT delivery model to achieve this," Taddei explains.
It also emerged from the survey that if respondents' organisations were to begin evaluating cloud computing services, 75.79% would initially move mail systems to the cloud, followed by Web services (64.21%) and file servers (51.58%).
Taddei explains: "Mail was one of the first applications to move towards the cloud. The primary driver of this has been the increasingly distributed nature of the modern workforce and the demand for access to e-mail from any location on multiple devices and operating systems. The classical 'Exchange' environment did not provide this flexibility and also required some significant infrastructure to run on."
Taddei says cloud-based solutions remove these inflexibilities and high costs and have also added the collaboration features normally only associated with large, expensive, centrally located, corporate-run systems.
The study also discovered that 32.53% of organisations would consider a hybrid cloud offering, 32.63% private and 18.95% trusted. Only 8.42% would consider public cloud offerings.
"The public cloud has an inherent distrust associated with it. Corporate governance demands that these issues be addressed - something public clouds cannot accomplish. This has seen the emergence of the 'trusted' cloud, which has all the benefits of scale that a public cloud enjoys yet addresses the security concerns of organisations," comments Taddei.
He continues: "Hybrid environments will continue to be the dominant cloud strategy for the foreseeable future, as organisations will not relinquish their core systems that drive their businesses. However, 'edge' systems like mail, collaboration, SharePoint, Web services, etc, will find cloud operators with the correct blend of functionality, security and cost to lure these systems into the cloud."
An overwhelming majority of respondents (89.47%) revealed that they see value in a local public cloud in SA, while 10.53% do not. Taddei states that the South African market has been watching the global cloud stage with keen interest over the past few years but has been slow in adopting cloud.
"The benefit of this is that the knowledge and understanding of these organisations has matured considerably and has now reached a point where the adoption rate has been increasing and is poised to increase rapidly. This presents an ideal environment for cloud operators to establish public/trusted clouds that are specific to the South African market, ie, locally based with local bandwidth and local pricing," Taddei concludes.
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