Cloud Service Adoption Grows Evolve IP Survey of 1,250+ Cloud Decision Makers Concludes

WAYNE, Pa., Aug. 26, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Eighty one percent of businesses report having at least one service deployed in the cloud and nearly nine in ten respondents regard cloud computing as the future model for IT according to a technology survey conducted by Evolve IP. The report also shows that even those that consider themselves non-believers in the cloud average at least one cloud service. The survey of more than 1,250 individuals, which provides current cloud adoption trends and future cloud deployment insights, revealed that barriers and concerns to cloud adoption have decreased compared to last year's cloud adoption report. Download the Cloud of Dreams - Adoption of the Cloud in 2014 survey and infographic for a complete review of the full findings.

Key results of the survey show that 88 percent of respondents believe that the future of IT is in the cloud and 70 percent of c-level, vice president and IT director-level respondents consider themselves "cloud believers." In addition, 58 percent of IT managers describe themselves as believers, a 5 point increase over 2013.

The upward trend of faith in the cloud among IT managers is notable since it's the IT managers who are often required to manage the deployment of cloud services, demonstrate the tangible benefits of cloud migrations, and select the vendors that will assist with deployments. The survey results found that slightly over half (56.5 percent) of all businesses in the cloud used a third party to assist with their migration, and of those that managed the deployment themselves, almost one in four (24 percent), would outsource their next project instead.

The survey also revealed a decrease in concerns and barriers about moving to the cloud. The biggest drop from 2013 is in the legal/compliance barrier, which fell 9 points. The top two concerns noted in the survey were related to the protection of data: security (noted by 53 percent) and privacy (marked by 36 percent).

Additional data from the report illustrates the growth of Microsoft solutions deployed in the cloud. Compared to survey adoption results in 2013, Microsoft Exchange, Lync and Office were more frequently deployed in the cloud with increases of 21.5 percent, 53 percent and 63 percent respectively. Further, Microsoft Office and Exchange are among the top five services expected for deployment in the next three years, signaling continued momentum in 2015 and beyond.

"This year's survey reinforces last year's data with a few major changes," says Guy Fardone, General Manager and Chief Operating Officer of Evolve IP, "We continue to see across the board drops in barriers to moving to the cloud and more support from IT managers as they have become more aligned with business executives. Also, as we have seen in our business, companies looking to move to the cloud on their own are experiencing some hiccups along the way.  As a result, almost one in four organizations will use a third party provider, like EvolveIP, the next time they migrate a service."

Additional Findings: Services in the Cloud

  ·Organizations report having on average 2.7 services in the cloud. Adoption, as expected, is higher among "believers" at 3.3 hosted services. Even among the "unbelievers" and "unconvinced," 54 percent expect to migrate at least one service to the cloud in the next three years.

  ·The primary benefit businesses are looking for from the cloud is disaster avoidance/recovery - sited by 73 percent of respondents.  Of those presently in the cloud five in ten have experienced disaster avoidance/ business continuity benefits.

  ·The top services respondents expect to deploy in the cloud over the next three years are servers/data centers (34 percent), co-location/backup infrastructure (22 percent), phone systems (22 percent) Microsoft Office (21.5 percent) and Microsoft Exchange (21 percent).

Additional Findings: Cloud Implementation Strategies

  ·Budgets for cloud services are increasing year over year with 42 percent of respondents noting a budget increase in 2014 and 54 percent expecting an increase in 2015. Of those with an increase in 2014, 80 percent expect to increase spending again in 2015.

  ·When evaluating planning strategies, 58 percent of respondents believe that their IT staff is able to implement a cloud strategy independently, while 30 percent feel that their internal staff's lack of knowledge about cloud services is a barrier to implementing cloud services. Of those with knowledge of their hypervisor selection, an overwhelming number (82.5 percent) have selected VMware ESX for cloud deployments.

Survey Methodology

Evolve IP conducted a blind, web-based survey during June 2014 with 1,257 IT / cloud decision maker respondents. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed were from organizations with reported revenue between 1 million dollars and 500 million dollars; 70.5 percent of the respondents came from organizations with between 50 and 5,000 employees, largely defined as mid-market. Evolve IP customers were excluded.

ABOUT EVOLVE IP

Evolve IP is The Cloud Services Company™. Designed from the beginning to provide organizations with a unified option for cloud services, Evolve IP enables decision-makers to migrate all or select IT technologies to its award-winning cloud platform. Evolve IP's combination of security, stability, scalability, and lower total cost of ownership is fundamentally superior to outdated legacy systems and other cloud offerings. Today, more than 50,000 users in the US and globally depend daily on Evolve IP for virtual data centers /servers, virtual desktops, unified communications,disaster recovery, contact centers, and more. Visit www.EvolveIP.net or http://blog.EvolveIP.net.

PRLog ID: www.prlog.org/12362840

SOURCE Evolve IP