20th September 2011
Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are often cited as the likely driving force for adoption of cloud computing services, and now a new survey shows the expectancy the cloud industry has placed on them adopting. Taken from an independent appraisal of 157 global cloud hosting organisations, 49% of global providers stated they expected the small business sector to drive uptake of cloud services in the next 12 months.
Commissioned by cloud software provider OnApp and distributed by WebHostingTalk, the survey also found that 27% of respondents expected the enterprise sector to be their primary source of growth, while only 18% saw the consumer cloud market as providing the greatest potential.The most common reasons SMBs adopt cloud computing were the ability it gives them to scale their IT services on demand; being able to pay just for the computing resources they use; the lower cost overall of cloud services; and not having to run their own IT infrastructure.
The study also showed that the strongest uptake of cloud services by businesses is anticipated from web and application developers, with 67% of cloud providers reporting this as the segment expected to drive the greatest growth. According to respondents already offering hosted cloud services, 42% expected to see growth from the broader IT sector, 39% from financial services and 30% from retail customers.
OnApp's CEO, Ditlev Bredahl, said of the results:
“Based on cloud adoption rates, this survey shows that cloud computing is most accessible to technical users right now. Adoption is being driven by small and medium sized businesses focused on application and web development. This makes sense, since sandboxed development, web development and testing are very well suited to a cloud environment. It’s easy to control costs during development, and as load increases. You can spin up a virtual machine, even if it’s just for an hour or two, because you only need to pay for the cloud as you use it.”
“As more cloud providers enter the market we’re seeing a broader range of industries beginning to take advantage of hosted cloud services. While consumers did not rank highly as a focus area in the survey, they are almost certainly using applications and web sites that are hosted on clouds,” he added.
For more information on the cloud hosting survey, visit: www.onapp.com
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