Executives and IT Professionals Seek Single Cloud Services Provider; Cloud Deployment Strategy Needed To Mitigate "Cloud Sprawl"

WAYNE, Pa., June 12, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Nearly seven in 10 executives and over half of IT professionals revealed that they would prefer having a single cloud services provider handling their varied hosted deployments according to a technology survey released today by Evolve IP. The survey also revealed that for the second consecutive year IT professionals and executives believe that when facing hardware malfunctions, malicious attacks and environmental disasters, their organization's data is safer in the cloud than on-premises. The survey of more than 1,500 professionals, which provides current cloud adoption trends and future cloud deployment insights, also revealed that just under nine in 10 organizations plan to move new or additional services to the cloud in the next three years.

Cloud sprawl, which takes place when multiple people and or departments deploy disparate hosted services, has firmly taken hold in many organizations with survey recipients indicating that their business had, on average, over 4 major cloud services in the cloud today – not including a breakout of specific SaaS applications. Additionally, 88 percent planned on moving more services to the cloud over the next three years including Microsoft applications, call centers and phone systems. The growth and sprawl has left executives and IT professionals feeling out of control and desiring consolidation. As a result, 68 percent of executives and 52 percent of IT professionals now desire having a single cloud services provider for their various cloud services.

"The rapid deployment of such a wide variety of cloud services has started to create chaos for IT and it somewhat offsets the benefits that are being realized," said Tim Allen, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer and Founding Partner of Evolve IP. "What we see in the survey results, along with what we hear in our conversations with customers and prospects, is that business executives and IT leaders want to stop cloud sprawl before it gets out of hand and firm up a unifying strategy. As a result, these businesses are seeking organizations that are capable of deploying multiple cloud services and acting as a partner instead of a one-off provider."

Data security also continued to be an ongoing concern, noted by 50.5 percent of respondents. This year's survey again asked where executives and IT professionals felt their data was safest under three common risk scenarios: environmental disasters, malicious attacks (e.g. cyberattacks) and hardware failure.

• For hardware malfunctions, the most common scenario for disaster recovery, 49 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 33 percent in a public cloud and 18 percent on-premises.
  
• For malicious attacks, 51 percent preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data versus 34.5 percent on-premises and 14.5 percent in a public cloud.
  
• For environmental disasters – 49.5 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 40.5 percent in a public cloud and 10 percent on-premises.

Additional Findings:

• Network costs were noted as a pain point by 1 in 3 survey takers (32 percent) yet nearly half of respondents were unfamiliar with SD-WAN technology. Only 1 in 10 have deployed SD-WAN for their headquarters or a branch location.
  
• Budget increases for 2017 were expected by 48 percent of respondents and 37 percent felt that a lack of budget would be a barrier to deployment; a 7 point increase over 2016.
  
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) was just the 4^th expected benefit of moving to the cloud noted by 60 percent of respondents. Scalability, flexibility and disaster avoidance/recovery/continuity ranked higher at 75 percent, 70.5 percent and 70 percent respectively
  
• Over 1 in 4 respondents (27.5 percent) expect to move their phone system to the cloud in the next three years and 1 in 5 plan on implementing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) in the same period.

Survey Methodology

The blind, web-based survey was conducted by Evolve IP during January of 2017, featuring over 1,500 respondents in multiple industries across North America. 76.25 percent came from organizations with between 50 and 5,000 employees, 9.5 percent from companies with more than 5,000, 10.25 percent were businesses with 11-49 associates and 4 percent were small businesses with 10 employees or less. Evolve IP customers were excluded from the survey.

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 the company's services, including disaster recovery, contact centers, virtual desktops, IP phone systems / unified communications, IaaS, and more, are deployed by more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with nearly 200,000 users, licensed seats and managed end points.  Visit www.EvolveIP.net for more information.

PRLog ID: www.prlog.org/12645219

SOURCE Evolve IP

Related Links

http://www.evolveip.net