Survey Looks At Drivers, Deterrents To Cloud App Adoption
By Cheryl Knight, contributing writer
A survey by Exoprise confirms cloud-based app adoption is growing — but there are still challenges for businesses to overcome.
The company asked more than 200 business executives and IT managers in North America about how they use — or plan to use — cloud-based apps and services as well as what is driving or hindering that use.
The research shows respondents use or plan to use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The survey also shows IaaS offerings (like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure) are commonly used among those responding to the survey, they are also increasingly using SaaS offering (like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, and Dropbox). The survey shows increased use is driven by operational agility and flexibility — more than by cost savings. Other factors that drive use are the ease to deploy and reconfigure them when the needs of the business change.
Concerns About Cloud Apps
One of the main obstacles to adoption of cloud applications lies on the security front. These concerns have led to a general lack of confidence on the part of business users and IT departments. More than 40 percent of those surveyed said that their IT team did not have the tools to monitor and manage the cloud apps they did have. Compare that to only 17 percent who feel the tools they currently have manage their cloud apps effectively.
What To Consider Before Moving To The Cloud
A Business Solutions guest column from Jason Lieblich, founder of Exoprise, suggests four things to consider — a “measure twice and ‘cutover’ once” approach — before deploying cloud-based apps:
- Cloud Provider Performance. He says emulating real-user behavior through synthetic transactions and API testing is a way to determine how a cloud-based application will perform across the service delivery infrastructure between the application provider and access locations.
- Service Uptime And Availability. Capturing reliable, regular benchmarks of systems before and during trials and rollouts can assist in capacity planning as well as real-time troubleshooting when something goes wrong.
- Network Path Performance. There is a need for continuous performance measurement of local and upstream Internet and network service providers, WAN/VPN routes, as well as access that end users will have when they are mobile.
- Power of the Crowd. Understand with data and statistics how cloud providers are operating in real-world conditions for companies of all sizes and regions.
For more detail and analysis of the survey findings, the Exoprise Cloud Trend Survey report is available at http://www.exoprise.com/cloud-trends-survey-2014/.