Why are organiztions adopting cloud computing?
I'm co-facilitating a panel on overcoming the barriers to cloud adoption at the The Host and Cloud Transformation Summit, an event being put on by another business unit of The 451 Group, my employer. I thought you'd enjoy a list of factors that are leading organizations to move some workloads into a cloud computing environment.
The 451 Group's CloudScape research team conducted a small survey at the beginning of 2010. This data is going to be used as a starting point for the panel discussion. Here are the factors:
- Flexibility in scaling IT up and down
- Agility
- Cost reduction
- Quicker time to deliver services
- Avoidance of capital expenditure
- Quicker time to value
- On-demand access
- Pay as you go
- Disaster Recovery
- Transparency of costs
- Other responses
I find it rather interesting that many suppliers spend most of their time talking about cost reduction or avoidance of capital expenditures when the folks who responded to this survey thought flexibility and agility ranked higher in their lists.
As a side note, I had the opportunity to speak with several members of the executive team of Blue Mountain Lab, CloudSoft, Enki and Host.net during the reception. It is amazing how much energy and creativity is being focused on cloud computing.