CloudCheckr survey says cloud computing adoption is accelerating

Enterprise

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Cloud transformation is moving quickly, according to a report released today by cloud visibility management platform CloudCheckr. In a survey of over 300 IT professionals and business stakeholders at companies with more than 500 employees, 57% reported that more than half of their infrastructure is in the cloud and 64% expected they will be fully in the public cloud within five years.

The global public cloud computing market is set to exceed $362 billion in 2022, according to Statista. (In 2018 alone, Amazon Web Services earned $26 billion in revenue for parent company Amazon.) IDG reports that the average cloud budget is up from $1.62 million in 2016 to a whopping $2.2 million today. But cloud adoption continues to present challenges for enterprises of any size. A separate Statista survey identified security, managing cloud spend, governance, and lack of resources and expertise as significant barriers to adoption.

Indeed, respondents told CloudCheckr that security concerns (44%), compliance and regulations (42%), and lack of application support (41%) remain significant barriers to cloud migration. Ninety-three percent said that their organizations face blockers with budgeting infrastructure cloud costs and 94% said that they’d experienced unexpected cloud costs. Only 31% reported that they were able to monitor and optimize public cloud costs “effectively,” meanwhile.

Cloud adoption benefits

But on the whole, the professionals surveyed said that their investments in internal cloud strategies and teams were paying off. Those at organizations with a cloud center of excellence, a team tasked with developing a framework for cloud operations, told CloudCheckr that they saw higher benefits than those where cloud expertise wasn’t organized.

“While it’s no surprise to anyone how strong cloud adoption is today, this report shows the tremendous growth ahead and how quickly it will happen over the next half decade. Now is the time for IT organizations to define the right strategies to utilize the full potential of the cloud and for cloud service providers to enhance their capabilities to lead their customers through cloud transformations,” CloudCheckr CEO Tim McKinnon said in a press release. “Migrating to the cloud is only the first step. It’s up to organizations to adopt the right technology and form teams — be it internally or externally — to develop and manage cloud strategy, governance, and best practices.”

It seems likely that as the pandemic continues, organizations will increasingly rely on remote work — and by extension cloud services — to help stem the spread of the virus. Gartner projects that this will cause the cloud market to grow 18.4% in 2021, with cloud predicted to make up 14.2% of total global IT spending. “As enterprises increase investments in mobility, collaboration, and other remote working technologies and infrastructure, Gartner expects growth in public cloud to be sustained through 2024,” the firm wrote in a November 2020 study.

Cloud providers are reaping the windfall benefits. In its most recent earnings report, Google said that its cloud division brought in $4.047 billion in sales for the first quarter of 2021, up 46% from the year prior. Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) posted a record $13.5 billion in profits for 2020. And Azure, Microsoft’s cloud business, notched third quarter 2021 revenue growth of 50% year-over-year, beating analyst expectations.

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