Cloud use in enterprises set to increase: Verizon

There was a few positive news for enterprise IT departments, however, with the revelation that private cloud on the rise with 44% of enterprises using, or planning to use, a private cloud system.

This year the highest ever number of enterprises (69%) said they had re-engineered at least one business process using cloud computing, nearly double the numbers from the previous year.

Enterprises are increasingly looking to do more with private cloud as the cost and skills barriers to using it continue to lower, Verizon’s third annual cloud use report suggests. The complete report is available as a free download from Verizon’s website.

About 27 percent of Verizon customers are using private cloud and 24 percent are using public cloud. An overwhelming majority (88%) said it was an improvement on their old computing model and improved responsiveness to the business, while 65% said it improved overall operations.

A further fifth are in the process of doing so, according to the report.

The study also found more than half (53%) of enterprises use between two and four cloud service providers, with 84% of companies reporting that their use of cloud technology has grown in the previous year. Once businesses get their feet wet with private cloud, they see how easy it is to migrate over into the public to support additional workloads.

More than three-quarters (77%) of respondents report that cloud technology gives their businesses competitive advantage, compared with 74% who reported the same the results in the 2014 report.

Verizon has found that 87% of businesses think cloud is at least as reliable as on-premises infrastructure and 40% say it is at least as secure. Headquartered in NY, Verizon also provides communications and entertainment services over America’s most advanced fiber-optic network, and delivers integrated business solutions to customers worldwide.

The report contradicted Gartner’s prediction earlier in 2015 that hybrid cloud is still around two to five years away from becoming a mainstream method of IT consumption.

The Verizon report categorized businesses in three personas according to how they view and use cloud technology: Skeptics at one end, natives at the other, and pragmatists in between.

The lean toward the cloud has reached the tipping point, according to Ryan Shuttleworth, cloud CTO for Verizon Enterprise Solutions and he predicts that companies will push on to look for “new opportunities to grow”. “This might include sophisticated load-balancing and acceleration, and highly resilient, ultra-high bandwidth connections between systems”.