Enterprise SaaS Goes Mission Critical: Gartner

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Businesses are placing more faith, and more mission critical applications, on the cloud, according to Gartner.

The IT market research firm announced today that it expects traditional on-premise software deployments to shrink to just 18 percent, compared to 34 percent today. In the absence of cloud-enabling updates or upgrades, today’s legacy software will remain on servers until it reaches the end of its useful life, added Gartner.

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Attitudes toward cloud-delivered software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions have clearly shifted, noted Gartner research vice president Joanne Correia. Armed with survey data from organizations in ten countries, namely the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, France, China, India, South Korea and Australia, she observed that many enterprises are no longer dabbling with cloud-based offerings.

“We’ve seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects,” said Correia in a statement. “Today, the projects are mission-critical and production grade.”

Correia described Gartner’s findings as “an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation (SFA) and email.” Yet cloud security concerns linger.

Gartner research director Laurie Wurster said in a statement that organizations are still worried about data breaches and application programming interfaces (APIs) with lax security when it comes to public cloud services. The NSA cyber-spying scandal isn’t helping matters, either.

“In addition, recent concerns of government snooping in the name of anti-terrorism and general privacy issues contribute to the lack of public cloud adoption,” she added.

Businesses are responding by driving increased adoption for private cloud solutions (46 percent) versus the public cloud (24 percent) over the next two years. Gartner observed that its “respondents’ cloud adoption behavior for software deployment suggests the majority of data centers are moving to private cloud deployment for implementation of new software,” said the research group.

While cost savings emerged as a key driver for increased cloud adoption (44 percent), rank-and-file IT staffers and managers have a different view of the cloud than CIOs and IT directors.

High-level technology executives were more likely to cite the cloud’s ability to drive innovation and promote more responsive business processes than their subordinates. “The conclusion is that CIOs are focused on using the cloud to establish a modern, innovative IT environment with operational agility and business advantage as key outcomes whereas business leaders (non-IT) still see the cloud as a means to save costs and may not yet have full appreciation for the business benefits or strategic opportunity of using cloud services,” stated Gartner.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.