9 Interesting Facts About the Cloud

At a networking event this week, I had a conversation with one of Data Canopy’s partners about business and the cloud, specifically the way companies are really using the cloud. We discussed the prevalence of multi-cloud and hybrid among our clients’ actual deployments and how different that reality can be from what you read in industry publications. What I’m about to share are facts based on surveys of businesses of all shapes and sizes and scientific data. Maybe it’ll help you to decide how to shape your cloud deployment. Maybe it will just be an interesting read on a Friday afternoon.

1. Managing costs is the #1 challenge among mature cloud users (knocking security and lack of resources and expertise out of the top spot) (From RightScale’s Cloud Computing Trends: 2017 State of the Cloud Survey)
2. 60% of enterprise IT server footprints are flat or shrinking (From Uptime Institute’s 2017 Data Center Industry Survey)
3. Gartner predicts that the public cloud services market will grow 18% to $246.8B in 2017 
4. 85% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy (From RightScale’s Cloud Computing Trends: 2017 State of the Cloud Survey)
5. Nearly half of IT managers plan to offset IT capacity with the cloud. (From Uptime Institute’s 2017 Data Center Industry Survey)
6. An IDC paper found that by 2020 21% of cloud spending worldwide will be on infrastructure as a service. 54% will be on applications (SaaS). 
7. In 2017, Microsoft Azure adoption rose from 26% to 43% while AWS adoption went from 56% to 59%. (From RightScale’s Cloud Computing Trends: 2017 State of the Cloud Survey)
8. 92% of all workloads are anticipated to be processed in the cloud by 2020 (Cisco Global Cloud Index)
9. Between 30-45% of cloud spend is wasted and optimization of existing cloud use is the #1 cloud initiative reported for 2017 (From RightScale’s Cloud Computing Trends: 2017 State of the Cloud Survey)

What is striking to me out of this is that regardless of the prevalence of the cloud in our businesses and lives, even the most mature cloud users are still coming to terms with how to effectively manage the cloud and its costs. As multi-cloud and hybrid IT solutions continue to rise in popularity, that will no doubt continue to be an issue and underscores the necessity of finding a trusted data center partner.