Report: Cloud Use Surges Dramatically, But Its ‘Edge’ Is Fading

Enterprises are increasingly adopting Cloud, but the competitive edge the technology promised appears to be fading, says a latest survey by US telecom firm Verizon. In the survey, 84 percent of respondents said their Cloud use has increased in the past year.

“As Cloud increasingly becomes the norm, the edge it gives a company is falling. It still has a major role to play in delivering competitive advantage, but using Cloud is now just table stakes,” stated the report.

But datacenters will only see their business rise in the days ahead, because the report is further proof that entrepreneurs no longer believe in “one Cloud fits all” strategy and they are adopting multi-Cloud strategy. More than half (53 percent) of enterprises use two to four Cloud providers and 26 percent use more than 10, says the report.

Furthermore, enterprises report moving mission-critical workloads to the Cloud improves business operations – 88 percent say it improves responsiveness to business needs, 65 percent say it improves overall operations.

“Last year, the news was that Cloud was being used for mission-critical workloads, now enterprises are using it to transform how they achieve that mission,” said Ryan Shuttleworth, Cloud chief technology officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Companies are using Cloud technologies to create new customer experiences, reengineer their business processes, find new opportunities to grow and manage risk and compliance measures.”

Cloud security may be a prime concern for IT professionals, but there is little indication that it is holding adoption back. The survey found that more companies are embracing the hybrid cloud and worrying less about security. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said that they believe Cloud is more secure than on-premise infrastructure.

That means Cloud skeptics are quickly becoming a relic of the past.