Private Cloud In Retreat, Public Cloud To Fore

The private cloud based on a heavily virtualized environment in the enterprise data center is going to have a limited shelf life, according to a new study.

The number of IT managers planning that approach was down to 28% of respondents in a recent survey and dropped to 16% as they looked forward to what's next in their future.

Use of public cloud computing, on the other hand, continues to mushroom. Two years ago, 20% of a similar set of respondents expected to get half or more of their IT services from the cloud. Today that number has nearly doubled to 39%.

At the other end of that question, those expecting to get 10% or less of their IT services from the cloud has dropped from 32% to 11%. The anticipated era of IT services emanating from the public cloud is registering on the radar of practical, caution-minded IT managers and system administrators.

The report, 2017 State of Cloud, was generated by InformationWeek and Interop ITX, organizer of the independent Interop show each year in Las Vegas. Interop ITX and InformationWeek are both owned by UBM Americas. The report was written by Joe Emison, CIO of Exceligent, a supplier of U.S. real estate information, who reviewed the by invitation-only responses from 307 IT managers and technology professionals at a variety of companies. Those responses were collected in December. Forty percent of responses were from companies with more than 1,000 employees. Half of the responders had a title of CIO, VP of IT, IT manager or IT director.

One of the surprising findings of the survey was that 85% of respondents reported using more than one cloud supplier and Emison concluded that number is likely to increase. At the same time, a majority of respondents said they hadn't adopted software that orchestrates workloads or manages their cloud operations, indicating future cloud deployments will impose increasing complexity and amount to a new management problem.

Another surprise was that among this sample group, use of both the Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services was going up, while use of Microsoft Azure was going down. AWS use increased among the respondents from 39% to 52%. Google Cloud increased from 23% to 38%. But Microsoft Azure declined 10% from 48% to 38%. Since respondents were using more than one cloud, the 2015 vs. 2016 figures across providers don't add up to 100%.

Read the rest of this article on InformationWeek.