Business-Critical Cloud Strategies

Cloud is now a viable solution for a wide variety of production and mission-critical application use cases.

To host critical workloads it’s important to select a cloud offering designed to meet a business' unique needs.  

A recent online survey of senior IT and business professionals in UK retail, consumer product and pharmaceutical companies examined mission-critical computing in the cloud.

The survey was carried out by Chief Nation on behalf of Virtustream and Intel.  

Private Hybrid Public

Cloud Strategies

With many IT departments’ concerns about the growth in ‘shadow IT’, 75% of the survey respondents’ use of cloud services is mediated by their respective IT teams. 

Half of the respondents plan to review or expand their use of cloud services within the next 12 months, and over a quarter within the next six months. 

Future Plans for Cloud

The performance and security of cloud providers’ services are manifestly the most important selection criteria for the respondents.

The relative importance of the cost in this section is likely to be a reflection of the need to assess cost differences between different cloud service providers, rather than cost differences between cloud services and the equivalent in-house services.

75% 75% 36% 33% 23%list performance as the most important criteria

list security as the most important criteria

list cost as the most important criteria

list ease of use as the most important criteria

application support as the most important criteria

Choice of Cloud Provider

SaaS

PaaS

IaaS

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140

Cloud Adoption of Cloud Models

Within 6 months Within 6 to 12 monthsAlready done No plans

Software as a service (SaaS) leads the respondents’ plans for future cloud developments, followed by platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), although IaaS is the most adopted to date. 

Adoption of Different Cloud Models

Time to market, rapid deployment and the ability to accommodate seasonal/unexpected spikes in demand are now the key drivers for cloud services.

While one of the selling points for cloud services in their infancy was their low cost, this is now the least important reason.

  75% of responders list time to market as their key driver for cloud usage

44% of responders list rapid deployment as their key driver for cloud usage

25% of responders list managed services as their key driver for cloud usage

22% of responders list maintenance as their key driver for cloud usage

19% of responders list cost as their key driver for cloud usage

Reasons for Cloud Adoption

Collaboration, business intelligence and file sharing are considered the most suitable areas for using cloud services, closely followed by social media, webmail, productivity and security. 

Sustainability of Cloud

Collaboration Web conference Bi, Marketing & Analytics

Webmail Business Productivity Security

Faster time to market is the main criteria for measuring the return on investment of cloud services, closely followed by better resource optimization (likely due to avoiding any internal IT-related delays and compliance requirements) and risk & compliance improvement. 

Measuring ROI

53% listed decreased time to market as an important means of measuring ROI of cloud services

44% listed increased resource optimization as an important means of measuring the ROI of cloud services

34% listed risk and compliance improvement as an important means of measuring the ROI of cloud services

33% listed decreased cost to market as an important means of measuring the ROI of cloud services

33% listed enhanced security as an important means of measuring the ROI of cloud services

25% listed increased margin and cost control as an important means of measuring the ROI of cloud services

On-demand cloud services create new patterns of resource consumption and they raise your customers’ expectations to get new services even faster, and with higher levels of availability and performance.

Virtustream enables IT organizations to meet the challenges and lower the risks of managing mission-critical clouds - while providing you and your customers with services that continually operate, improve, and adapt to changing markets and technologies.

Download the Business Critical Cloud report here: bit.ly/11SA52I 

For more information, contact us at info@virtustream.com

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