Cloud Services Used Only by 38 Percent of Organizations Worldwide

Cloud services are still a small part of overall IT spending, according to a Gartner survey which revealed that only 38 percent of organizations worldwide use the technology. The study, though, showed that 80 percent of the companies surveyed plan to move to the cloud in the following year, including half of those not using it now.

“Given that the use of cloud services currently constitutes only a very small part of the vast enterprise IT market, strategic planners should not make the mistake of taking current cloud use cases to be predictors of future cloud use,” Gartner Research Director Gregor Petri said.

“Cloud computing is set to have a considerable impact on business in the future which is reflected in the survey finding that around 60 percent of organizations plan increased investment over the next two years to five years, while only 6 percent plan to decrease investments in cloud services.”

One factor impacting cloud use is the more diverse solution portfolio the organizations will have, according to Gartner. Individual applications can be rehosted to run on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), recoded for Platform as a Service (PaaS), replaced with Software as a Service (SaaS) applications or the business process can be resourced altogether.

The survey was conducted on 651 organizations in nine countries to understand how companies are shifting from traditional technology to cloud services. Cloud strategies will be discussed at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo that will be held in Orlando, Florida, in October.