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Cloud Computing: The Easy Stuff is Done with Tough Challenges Ahead
For the cloud, “the easy stuff is done,” declared Art Wittman in an InformationWeek wrap-up article re-capping the technology highlights for 2012. Challenges in the areas of integration and security lie ahead for the cloud. And those challenges are beginning to slow the rate of acceptance for the technology. While there is no doubt that cloud computing is radically changing the world of IT, InformationWeek measured the uptick in new-adopter companies for 2011 to be a modest 2 percent. In 2009, 18 percent of companies were using cloud services. That number jumped dramatically in 2010 to 31 percent, but this past year it has stayed fairly constant, finishing out the year at 33 percent.
The breakdown for exactly how organizations use the cloud is as follows:
- 57 percent use SaaS
- 56 percent use it to enable virtualization
- 42 percent use the cloud as a platform
- 27 percent use the cloud for their IT infrastructure
One segment of the cloud that did see significant growth in 2011 was Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR). The goal of BC/DR is to be able to safely store in a location remote to an organization’s central operations important business data that can quickly be brought on-line should a disaster strike the main organization’s central data infrastructure. Many organizations are recognizing that the nature of the cloud makes it an ideal fit for BC/DR solutions. In 2010, 34 percent of organizations were using the cloud for BC/DR. In 2010, that number jumped to 43 percent. The main barrier to adoption are concerns with security, and the InformationWeek report found that concern over cloud security is actually rising rather than dropping. Of those organizations not using the cloud for BC/DR, slightly more than half say that their concern is with security.
The InformationWeek report also found that companies are increasingly using virtualization. A quarter of organizations are planning to virtualize as many as 75 to 90 percent of all of their servers. Virtualization is increasingly popular because of the benefits that it brings like higher availability and better flexibility and agility.
