The future of cloud computing

North Bridge Venture Partners, in conjunction with Gigaom Research and 72 collaborating organizations, today released results for its Future of Cloud Computing survey. This survey analyzed the inhibitors and drivers behind cloud adoption, separating the hype surrounding the cloud from genuine industry trends and real world cases across a sample of 1,358 respondents.

“With four years of data, we’re now really beginning to see some interesting trends, such as the five-fold increase in SaaS adoption to 74% and the nearly six-fold increase in PaaS adoption to 41%.” said Michael Skok, founder of the Future of Cloud program and General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners.

Cloud adoption is strategic

• 49% of respondents in this year’s survey are using cloud to fuel revenue generation or new product creation.
• 45% of businesses say they already, or plan to, run their company from the cloud – showing how integral cloud is to business.

SaaS adoption has more than quintupled…

• …from 13% adoption in 2011 to 74% in this year’s survey, but in the enterprise it is still mostly transitioning existing applications.
• The front office is leading the way with sales and marketing at 51% adoption, customer service, and analytics both at 43% adoption.

IaaS and PaaS adoption reaching a tipping point

• 56% of businesses are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technologies to harness elastic computing resources.
• 41% of businesses are using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies to prototype and develop new applications.

Data wants to be bigger in the cloud

• Two-thirds of respondents believe their data will come to reside in some form of cloud over the next two years as bigger data needs consolidation, and collaboration & creation go online.

Cloud drivers and inhibitors

Over the last few years, the drivers for cloud adoption have remained constant with agility, cost and scalability as the top three. One area that has moved up the agenda as a driver though is that companies are increasingly moving workloads to the cloud to switch CapEx for OpEx. This is especially true for large companies with more than 5,000 employees.

On the inhibitor front, security continues to be a strong barrier with 49% of respondents concerned about how secure their data is in the cloud. Privacy concerns also rose, once again, to 31% in 2014 as increased tension manifested itself between the desire for anonymity and the convenience and utility of personalization. This is an area for vendors and enterprises to distinguish themselves as faithful custodians of personal data and engendering trust.

Of note, interoperability as an inhibitor saw a significant decrease from 27% last year to 17% in 2014 with greater attention being paid to issues like data portability. However, fear of vendor lock-in was still 29%, which put focus on open source cloud projects, like OpenStack, that have grown significantly.