How enterprises can ensure success with the public cloud

1. Summary

While public cloud computing continues to mature as a technology, those in charge of public cloud solutions within enterprises adopt the technology at their own pace and for their own reasons. Indeed, they are all on separate journeys, but many of the same business objectives apply.

In order to determine the progress of enterprises’ journey to the public cloud, Gigaom Research created a survey designed to understand what is happening within enterprises that are adopting public cloud computing. This survey was designed to determine emerging patterns of use and patterns of adoption, which, until now, have not been well understood, even by the enterprises themselves.

This survey revealed key items such as:

• The use of public cloud computing is quickly expanding, and most organizations already exploit public-cloud-based resources to run both critical and non-critical business systems. The general trend is that cloud computing has proven itself, it’s perceived as safe, and most organizations are now executing cloud strategies that include an increasing volume of application and data migration to the public cloud.
• Application development and testing are among the highest value uses of leveraging the public cloud, and most enterprises have moved from proof of concept to actual deployments in the past few years. The number of public cloud deployments is likely to sharply increase in 2015 and 2016, if current trends revealed in the survey continue.
• A larger number of business units leverage public cloud resources that are composed of largely AWS and a few other public cloud providers. While IT drove some migrations, many others moved to the public cloud independent of enterprise IT (shadow IT).
• A surprising number of public cloud instances support the daily operations of many businesses, with a smaller percentage emerging as heavy users that leverage a massive amount of public cloud resources. Moving forward, the number of public cloud instances managed by enterprises will sharply increase. The survey indicated an increasing movement of applications and data into public cloud production environments, a trend that seems to be accelerating.
• Initial cloud projects are a thing of the past, with most working on their second, third, or higher major cloud deployments. While there was a learning curve, most of those surveyed trust the cloud. They consider it the path of least resistance for new and existing application deployments and for effective and scalable production. In other words, it’s become a part of the infrastructure.
• Change management and cloud governance are becoming more commonplace and accepted by enterprises. The use of these technologies and methodologies continues to increase, becoming a key enabler of the management of change, services, and/or cloud-resource governance. This trend will certainly continue as enterprises seek technology that is independent of the major public cloud providers. Because most enterprises deploy more than one public cloud, these clouds need to be managed by leveraging polices that control access and changes and have the ability to manage the increasing complexity as public cloud computing takes a larger footprint in the enterprise.

What’s more important than the data gathered in this survey is what the data means. In this report we look at the strategic objectives of the movement to the public cloud, including how fast or slow enterprises are adopting this technology. We analyze how this journey to public cloud adoption will ultimately lead to exceptional, good, or less-than-optimal outcomes, and what enterprises can do now to insure success with the public cloud.