Verizon recently released its State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2016 report, detailing enterprise cloud adoption and trends. Here are the highlights. 
Early on, organizations only trusted the cloud with generic, non-crucial workloads. However, more and more companies are trusting the cloud with their key workloads. According to Verizon’s recently released State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2016 report, 87% of enterprises are trusting the cloud with at least one mission critical workloads, up from the 60% in 2013 and 71% in 2014.
In addition to the growth of cloud used for critical workloads, it is growing for general use as well. Of those surveyed for the report, 84% said their cloud use had increased over the past year. Also, around half of the companies said they’ll be using cloud for 75% of their workloads, or more, by 2018.
Going even further, the report said: “In just a couple of years, we believe that over half of all workloads—across organizations of all kinds—will be running in the cloud.”
“These statistics shows the change in perception amongst enterprise as a few years ago, it was considered risky to transform businesses via cloud, whereas now where it tends to be riskier for people who do nothing because they end up getting left behind,” said Ryan Shuttleworth, cloud CTO for Verizon Enterprise Solutions.
Respondents for this report seem to agree% of those surveyed said they believed their cloud environment was as secure, or more secure than their on premise infrastructure.
Another shift has been in perceived reliability of the clouds. According to the report, 87% said that the cloud was as reliable and available as on-premise offerings, if not more so.
- Improving responsiveness to business needs – 88%
- Improving operations – 65%
- Saving money – 41%
- Keeping pace/responding to competition – 35%
- Addressing lack of internal skills – 29%
- Simplifying regulatory compliance – 18%
- Improving security – 18%
The top four responses are fairly common reasons for moving to the cloud, but the bottom three are significantly more interesting. “Addressing lack of internal skills” means that enterprises are looking to cloud providers, or private cloud capabilities, to fill the gaps in their workforce. “Simplifying regulatory compliance” and “Improving security” are equally as important because they point to a shift taking place in that, for some organizations, the cloud is eliminating more work than it is creating.
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