Verizon: Enterprise Cloud Use is 'Table Stakes'

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Looking to gain a competitive edge by adopting cloud technologies? So is practically everyone else, according to the latest report from telecom giant Verizon, 2016 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud.

Although most businesses believe that the cloud gives them a competitive advantage (77 percent), the number of expecting the cloud to skyrocket them ahead of their peers is dwindling. In 2014, 30 percent of businesses said the cloud gave them a competitive advantage. This year, only 16 percent held that view.

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“As cloud increasingly becomes the norm, the edge it gives a company is falling. It still has a major role to play in delivering competitive advantage, but using cloud is now just table stakes,” stated Verizon’s report.

As further proof that cloud computing is becoming the norm, 84 percent said their use of the transformational technology had increased in the past year. Among those who have migrated mission-critical workloads to the cloud, 88 percent reported that it improved business responsiveness. Another 65 percent said it improved operations overall.

The cloud impact can be felt well beyond IT, according to Ryan Shuttleworth, cloud chief technology officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Companies are using cloud technologies to create new customer experiences, reengineer their business processes, find new opportunities to grow and manage risk and compliance measures,” he said in a statement.

A significant number of organizations are turning to private cloud solutions (44 percent) while over a third (37 percent) said they were using or planning on using the public cloud, the study found. Half of all enterprises said they expect that the cloud will power at least 75 percent of their workloads by 2018.

Cloud security may be a prime concern for IT professionals, but there’s little indication that it is holding adoption back. Eighty percent of organizations view the cloud as secure, or more secure, than their on-premises infrastructure.

And when it comes to cloud providers, businesses aren’t afraid to shop around. More than half (53 percent) said they use the services of two to four cloud companies. Twenty-six percent are using more than 10 cloud providers.

Cloud skeptics are quickly becoming a relic of the past. According to the report, “it’s very unusual for us to find an organization that hasn’t adopted cloud to some degree. Only 6 percent of respondents in our survey said they think their company will have less than 25 percent of workloads in the cloud by 2018.”

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

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.