Cloud Adoption Rates Rise by 15 Percent: ODCA Survey

Members of the Open Data Center Alliance are adopting the cloud faster than originally predicted, according to a new survey, which found that members are scaling cloud adoption 15 percent faster than previously forecast.

Over half of responding members said they will be running more than 40 percent of their IT operations in the private cloud by 2015 and approximately 25 percent will be running more than 40 percent of their operations in the public cloud.

The Open Data Center Alliance is an independent IT consortium comprised of global IT leaders whose goal is to provide a unified customer vision for long-term data center requirements.

ODCA officials said the results signal broad adoption of cloud service by members with over two-thirds of members planning on requirement integration into purchasing decisions within the next two years.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), human resources, finance, and sales and marketing are among the applications driving broad member adoption, according to Mario Müller, ODCA chairman and vice president IT infrastructure at BMW.

“Our diverse membership provides us with a unique perspective on the trends and challenges surrounding cloud computing,” Müller said in a statement. “This survey not only shows that companies are increasingly using the cloud for critical business applications, but are also making their IT purchasing decisions based on ODCA requirements. Clearly, the ongoing, collaborative efforts of the ODCA are having a major impact on the industry.”

Security continues to lead as a top motivator in cloud adoption targets for members in the second annual ODCA member survey. The survey, which included responses from 63 ODCA members, revealed several cloud trends, including the following:

13 percent of respondents have already made purchase decisions based on ODCA requirements, well ahead of the Alliance’s expected initial solution deployments at year’s end.

Three-quarters of members are planning hybrid application deployments across public and private cloud environments.

Security Monitoring (63 percent) and Security Provider Assurance (63 percent) are the leading usage model targets for member adoption, and are followed closely by identity related requirements.

Sales and marketing (53 percent) and productivity (47 percent) are the leading opportunities for public cloud software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) applications.

Members called out peer networking, vendor solution influence and technical problem solving as the leading values in Alliance membership.

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