News

Survey Shows Enterprise Workloads Moving to Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 09/08/2016

451 Research has published a study indicating that enterprise IT execs expect 60 percent of workloads to run in the cloud by 2018.

That finding was revealed in the company's latest Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation survey of IT buyers, the company announced last week.

Right now, 41 percent of enterprise workloads are running in the cloud -- public or private -- which shows IT execs expect significant movement in that area.

"Among the various types of cloud deployment models, enterprises are most likely to use on-premises private cloud and software as a service (SaaS), each accounting for 14 percent of all applications," the research firm said in a statement. "Respondents indicate usage of on-premises private cloud will remain flat while SaaS is expected to grow sharply to nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of all enterprise workloads by mid-2018."

The survey was conducted in May and June of this year, polling more than 1,200 IT pros around the globe. It's part of a quarterly series.

Survey respondents reported strong cloud usage in categories such as Web/media and application development. Meanwhile, critical enterprise workload categories expected to see strong overall growth by 451 Research include data and analytics and business applications.

"The predicted doubling of IaaS usage is the highest growth expectation for any type of cloud and points to significant revenue potential for vendors in this space," said 451 exec Andrew Reichman. "Because cloud delivers increasing agility and flexibility to better fit ever-changing business needs, IaaS and SaaS allow organizations to focus their efforts on their business, rather than on maintaining costly and complex datacenters and infrastructure. If used properly, it has the potential to dramatically improve efficiency and results of business technology usage."