Cloud services remain a small part of overall IT spending Gartner reports-- according to a recent survey only 38% of organisations currently use cloud services, even if 80% intend to do so within 12 months.
The survey covers 651 organisations across 9 countries.
"Given that the use of cloud services currently constitutes only a very small part of the vast enterprise IT market, strategic planners should not make the mistake of taking current cloud use cases to be predictors of future cloud use," Gartner says. "Cloud computing is set to have a considerable impact on business in the future which is reflected in the survey finding that around 60% of organizations plan increased investment over the next 2 years to 5 years, while only 6% plan to decrease investments in cloud services."
Gartner mentions 3 factors to "significantly" impact near to midterm enterprise cloud use-- tactical business solutions, the increase of cloud service impact the more enterprises move up the cloud value chain chain and how the introduction of cloud solutions leasds to more diverse solution portfolios.
With the first factor, the analyst says solutions addressing specific problems are a key to cloud usage growth, since generally the road from early adopters to the majority market is not a straight line.
As for the second, Gartner says "while rehosting, recoding or recompiling existing applications to run on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) cloud services may have limited impact on the rest of the organisation, replacing existing applications with higher level cloud services will have a much bigger impact on the way enterprises organize their business processes... The impact becomes even larger once companies start to explore the new possibilities cloud services offer."
The final factor covers the lifecycle of various cloud services, and how diverse cloud services can be resources as IaaS. PaaS or SaaS through a variety of timelines and approaches-- meaning the cloud is a field of much complexity and of little shortcuts and silver bullets.
Go Gartner: Three Factors Will Significantly Impact Enterprise Cloud Use in the Near to Midterm Future
