Only 20% of IT Execs Are Very Satisfied with Cloud’s Benefit of Fast, Easy IT Resources— Forrester Study Shows

Forrester Consulting’s September 2013 white paper, Building for the Future: What the New World of Cloud IT Means for the Network, looks into adoption trends in cloud technology, application usage types in cloud environments, satisfaction levels of IT leaders regarding the anticipated benefits of cloud adoption, and the various effects of cloud services to enterprise networks.

Commissioned by Juniper Networks and XO Communications, the Forrester study polled 150 IT decision makers in firms covering a wide range of industries and employing more than 500 people. Fifty-four percent of the respondents reported being the final decision makers in their organizations’ use of cloud/SaaS implementations and/or vendor selection, while 46 percent said that they influence decisions on implementation of and/or vendor selection for cloud/SaaS services or manage vendor relations.

The key findings of the study include the following:

There is widespread adoption of cloud services, and business-critical applications are being shifted from internal data centers to the cloud.  

More than 75 percent of enterprises use or plan to use a certain type of cloud-based service. Compared to last year, 50 percent more respondents this year plan to move their revenue-generating B2B ecommerce sites to the cloud. In addition, more than 50 percent of polled IT decision makers said that their organization would use four or more cloud platforms.

The Forrester study also finds that the top three cloud-based services are software, storage, and disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS).

Outside of cost savings, the true value of cloud services remains elusive for many companies

The study reveals that one of the major benefits of adopting cloud services is appreciated by only a few IT professionals. Only 20 percent of IT decision makers said that they were very satisfied by the cloud’s ability to provide fast and easy IT resources. This is because numerous infrastructural and operational aspects supporting cloud services are not based in the cloud but in the network—which most enterprises have not readied or updated yet for migration to cloud IT.

And while 88 percent of IT decision makers believe cloud-based services would have an impact on their network, less than half of those polled said that their respective organizations made network upgrades in the past three years. In fact, most organizations prioritized the implementation of cloud-based services and other IT initiatives over refreshing their network. The five other IT initiatives being accorded a higher priority over network upgrades include server upgrades, pursuing cloud services, storage refresh, PC refresh, and upgrades to security environments.

For the new world of cloud IT, a scalable, agile, and high-performance network is required.

To enhance the value of their cloud services and to have room for the impact of such cloud services on the network, majority of IT organizations need to perform an upgrade on their company’s networks. The study uncovers that 78 percent of enterprises need to upgrade one or more aspects of their network, 47 percent need to upgrade their network bandwidth, and 46 percent need to invest in new security services.

“What is clear in the study is that enterprise networks have reached a tipping point with respect to being able to support more business-critical services that reside in the cloud,” said Don MacNeil, chief marketing officer at XO Communications. “In order to realize the full benefits of cloud-based services, companies will have to examine their networks for readiness, align it with their business and IT strategy, and start to design new network infrastructures to enable a scalable, high-performing, cost-effective and secure cloud services environment.” (KOM) Link. Link. Link.