Cloud Adoption Trends: A Growing Reality

Cloud computing provides a more efficient, flexible and cost-effective model for computing – one that allows IT to operate with much more agility and respond faster to business opportunities. Today, more enterprises recognize the strategic value of cloud computing as a tool for IT innovation to fuel greater business agility. And organizations can leverage the cloud's ever-expandable, self-serviced and always-available infrastructure to speed the delivery and reliability of new and existing applications. What's more, the efficiency of the cloud can free up funds for service-led innovation. Conversely, organizations that do not embrace the cloud risk losing ground in a rapidly changing business environment.

According to a recent cloud adoption survey conducted by VMware, two-thirds of the more than 600 respondents at global enterprise companies are adopting cloud services now (or are planning to) adopt them in the very near future. Nearly 88 percent of respondents reported that cloud computing is either a critical, high or moderate priority for their organization over the next 18 months. And 22 percent of survey respondents indicate they already have department- and enterprise-wide cloud deployments in progress.

What was the top driver for Cloud adoption? Seventy percent of respondents identified business agility as the top driver for cloud computing. The rationale is clear: Cloud computing is strategic, and imminent to today's enterprises.

Cloud computing is far more than a mechanism to support one-off projects or commodity business applications for many CIOs. Rather, it is a platform for IT transformation, allowing organizations to operate faster and more efficiently, so that in turn, they accelerate their businesses. With the ultimate goal being transformation, forward-looking enterprises understand that they cannot wait; they must take the first steps on the cloud journey.

For nearly half of all the respondents that have ventured into cloud computing, implementations have been more opportunistic:

Cloud Adoption Point #1: Project-Based 26 percent of respondents report they adopted a cloud computing model for isolated projects or in environments with limited scope and budget. In more than two-thirds of these cases, teams began using the cloud for software test and development projects.

Cloud Adoption Point #2: Business Applications Twenty-five percent of respondents have implemented a cloud computing approach to allow users to access business applications as a service. The majority of the cases began with applications such as e-mail, human resources systems, and collaboration tools that, in the event of downtime, may not have the same business impact as e-commerce payment processing and enterprise resource planning systems.

For the rest of the respondents who have ventured into cloud computing, implementations have been more strategic in nature:

Cloud Adoption Point #3: IT Platform Transformation
39 percent of respondents say they are moving to the cloud to fundamentally change the way IT is produced and consumed to create more agile and cost-effective infrastructures. Here's how they have approached it. The majority (63 percent) of respondents have begun the move to the cloud by implementing a portfolio of infrastructure services to support multiple applications. Regardless of how far they are into the process, nearly half of the respondents report that they are creating a high-level services roadmap that will guide their organization's practices across private and public clouds.

Cloud Adoption Point #4: Business Transformation
10 percent saw their cloud adoption starting point as a business-transforming initiative with significant organizational impact. Of this group, most see their work evolving to an IT-as-a-Service model. Furthermore, majority expect to use the cloud to facilitate new or dramatic changes in their business operations or models – an effort that points to significantly transforming businesses.

As a means of delivering IT services, cloud computing has experienced a standardized approach. But the way in which individual businesses approach cloud is not. At VMware, we recognize that every business will have a different approach to cloud computing. Your business is unique. Your cloud should be, too. VMware is here to help you move beyond the limitations of a one-cloud-fits-all approach by supporting multiple cloud deployment models to provide you with the flexibility to grow and adapt as your business requirements change.

This enterprise "hybrid" cloud combines the best of both cloud deployment models – the enterprise-scale security, quality of service and performance of a private cloud, with the flexibility and scalability of a public cloud. The model allows public clouds to interoperate with private cloud infrastructures to help IT function with greater agility:

• Workloads, virtual machines and applications can port easily between private and public clouds in response to changing business conditions.
• Performance isn't subject to the whims of other cloud tenants' requirements. Instead, compute, memory and storage resources may be guaranteed for the enterprise's own environment, either on shared or physically separated hardware.
• A single command-and-control dashboard monitors, manages and automates the infrastructure, applications, operations and processes across different cloud environments.
• The same level of enterprise-class cloud security and management is provided across both internal and external environments.

In other words, it's not about THE cloud, it's about YOUR cloud. VMware's unrivaled experience, customer base and partner community can help you move beyond current IT limitations, to your cloud – where you can accelerate IT which, in turn accelerates meaningful results for your business.

Let VMware help you deliver your cloud and fulfill your strategic vision.

Learn more at www.vmware.com/go/transform.