2011 Cloud Computing Outlook Survey Results

Blog: "2011 Cloud Computing Outlook Survey Results"

'via Blog this'

Cloud.com conducted this survey in the second quarter of 2011 to determine cloud computing usage trends among IT professionals who participate in the BitNami, CloudStack and Zenoss open source software and user communities. The results are collated from responses of 521 individuals as to their usage and preferences for virtualization and cloud computing technologies. You can download the Cloud Computing Outlook Survey here (no registration required). Here's a quick summary of the results:

• Most IT professionals prefer to deploy their infrastructure using virtualization (77%)
• 61% of organizations are in the information gathering or planning stages or have an approved cloud computing strategy (but no implementation), 20% have cloud implementations and 20% have no cloud computing plans at this point
• 70% of data center managers choose to deploy infrastructure on dedicated resources (e.g. dedicated servers and data center resources) while only 12% prefer to deploy their infrastructure in the public cloud.
• The overwhelming use case specified by survey participants was for development/test labs (61%), followed by the desire to build a private cloud that mimics the capabilities of public cloud service providers (33%)
• Hardware savings was cited as the most popular reason for using cloud-based storage and platform-as-a-service.
• 12% of IT professionals indicated their preference was to run their infrastructure in public clouds
• 36% of respondents indicated that their preference was to run their infrastructure virtually but hosted on dedicated hardware at a managed data center
• The open source Linux operating system is the dominant guest operating system in the cloud with 83% of IT professionals planning to deploy Linux as a guest operating system, 66% will be deploying Windows OSes in the cloud
• Open source usage is pervasive among cloud computing users with 69% using open source software whenever possible while only 3% claim not to use open source software at all. All government users indicated some degree of open source usage.
• Of those users who don't use open source software 58% have no cloud computing strategy
• Among cloud computing users 59% will use compute clouds, 51% will use cloud storage and 47% will be using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings
• Of all participants surveyed the prevalent use for cloud computing was to host websites (57%), followed by document management (39%)
• The top factor influencing the use of cloud computing is scalability (61%), followed by overall cost savings (54%) and easier management (53%)
• Among public companies faster deployment of infrastructure was the most popular benefit(72%) of cloud computing
• Hardware savings was the number one reason cited for adopting cloud computing (68%), faster deployment of infrastructure (66%) and to reduce systems management burden (57%) were also top reasons for cloud adoption.
• The number one overall reason inhibiting cloud computing adoption is lack of cloud computing training (43%), followed by security concerns (36%).
• Of the surveyed Chief Technical Officers, scalability (71%) was the most popular reason for adopting cloud computing followed by elasticity (61%), or the need to adjust to fluctuations in resource demands (61%)
• 43% of users prefer VMware for server virtualization while 13% indicated a preference for Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) or Xenserver
• 53% of organizations surveyed indicated a gap between their current tools and the systems management tools they need to manage their cloud computing environments.
• The biggest management challenge for cloud computing users was security (36%) followed by monitoring (30%)
• Regulatory compliance was an inhibitor for 20% of potential cloud computing users

About the author

mrhinkle

Mark is the Citrix Director of Cloud Computing Community where he is responsible for driving all of the community efforts around the company's leading open source, cloud computing software and ecosystem . Before that he was the force behind the Zenoss Core open source management projects adoption and community involvement, growing community membership to over 100,000 members. He is a co-founder of both the Open Source Management Consortium and the Desktop Linux Consortium, has served as Editor-in-Chief for both LinuxWorld Magazine and Enterprise Open Source Magazine, and authored the book, "Windows to Linux Business Desktop Migration." (Thomson, 2006) Mark has also held executive positions at a number of technology start-ups, including Earthlink, (previously MindSpring)--where he was the head of the technical support organization recognized by PC Computing and PC World as the best in the industry--Win4Lin and Emu Software.