In April - May 2011 Deloitte and CIOnet performed a cloud adoption survey using the CIOnet Platform in Europe. The objective of the study was to better understand the use and the potential of cloud computing within the CIO Community.
The survey confirmed that the business is taking a leading role in adopting cloud. This is because ever more they realise that cloud computing is helping to achieve business goals. It clearly showed that public software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the dominant cloud type in use and that platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) are catching up. The understanding of the market with respect to cloud computing is lacking and confusion exists on the service descriptions. What is nevertheless clear, is that cloud computing is here to stay.
Conclusion.
The CIOnet Survey confirmed the fact that cloud computing is rising in terms of adoption, and that more organisations are looking at implementing cloud computing. While cloud computing still poses some challenges stopping a minority not to implement or consider cloud computing, it has definitely progressed and is now becoming mainstream.
The anticipated business benefits in terms of business case, financial value, strategic direction and flexibility provided are appreciated by organisations worldwide and the current adoption curve confirms that cloud computing is here to stay and has a potential to transform business and IT.
While cloud computing has been a hot topic in IT the last couple of years, it has now also caught the attention of the business as they are ever more involved in the discussion, the decision on using cloud computing and the implementation of the solutions.
From a vendor side, we notice there is still work required improve the understanding of cloud computing as the market is missing a clear and universal understanding of what cloud computing is, the different types and the different services.
The results of the CIOnet survey clearly indicate that the concept of cloud computing is better understood and that both business and IT departments are involved. The current levels of cloud computing adoption support this. However today the breadth that cloud computing offers is not yet completely used as many organisations make their “cloud move” on the most obvious offerings. This is likely caused by a lack of complete understanding of cloud computing and the different cloud computing offerings and terminology. We expect that as maturity increases and offerings get clearer, organisations will further expand their cloud sourcing and vary the models they use.