Our 2011 InformationWeek Analytics State of Cloud Computing Survey shows a 67 percent increase in the number of companies using cloud services, up from 18 percent in February 2009 and 30 percent in October 2010. IT now has a choice: Grab ownership of what's poised to be a core part of the enterprise technology toolset, or shortchange key functions and set ourselves up for disaster.
This shouldn't be a hard call, yet over and over we see CIOs underfund or ignore six major areas: integration, security, connectivity, monitoring, continuity planning and long-term staffing. Only 29 percent of companies using or planning to use the cloud have evaluated its impact on their architectures. Just 20 percent implement monitoring of applications and throughput; 40 percent don't have any monitoring in place. Talk about blind trust.
There's a misperception that it's smaller companies driving the cloud usage upswing. But don't write off management shortfalls as an SMB problem; we saw almost the same rates of use and planned use regardless of company size, once we delved into the data. There are now viable cloud options for almost every layer of the technology stack--from raw computing, storage, databases and utilities to e-mail to the spectrum of enterprise applications, all with a "point, click, go" functionality that has maverick business units everywhere rejoicing. Ignore management at your peril. source
This shouldn't be a hard call, yet over and over we see CIOs underfund or ignore six major areas: integration, security, connectivity, monitoring, continuity planning and long-term staffing. Only 29 percent of companies using or planning to use the cloud have evaluated its impact on their architectures. Just 20 percent implement monitoring of applications and throughput; 40 percent don't have any monitoring in place. Talk about blind trust.
There's a misperception that it's smaller companies driving the cloud usage upswing. But don't write off management shortfalls as an SMB problem; we saw almost the same rates of use and planned use regardless of company size, once we delved into the data. There are now viable cloud options for almost every layer of the technology stack--from raw computing, storage, databases and utilities to e-mail to the spectrum of enterprise applications, all with a "point, click, go" functionality that has maverick business units everywhere rejoicing. Ignore management at your peril. source
