According to the December 2014 edition of PAC’s CloudIndex, the maturity of companies with regard to the Cloud continues to grow and the adoption of its solutions has even jumped – due in particular to the prior underestimation of actual usage. As a result, 55% of companies now say they use Cloud solutions, compared to 29% last June.
Companies are primarily using SaaS applications (54%). The IaaS offers, less democratized until now, are declared used by 46% of respondents. According to the firm, they are of particular interest to companies with less than 500 employees who use these solutions for application hosting (54%), testing (49%), and website hosting (46%). PaaS remains in the background (+6 points), mainly because it is “mainly confined to developers”.
But the Cloud is not just about solutions. Services are developing in parallel. The French firm estimates the value of services (consulting, integration …) marketed in 2013 at 1.2 billion dollars. And these expenses should grow by an average of 39% per year by 2018. In total, the French Cloud market should reach 5 billion dollars in late 2014 and exceed 7 billion in 2018.
The quest for agility – According to CloudIndex, “the need for flexibility and the desire to reduce costs are the main reasons for moving to the Cloud (66%), ahead of improving time to market (60%) and developing innovative products, solutions or approaches (59%)”
30% of companies are now formalizing real Cloud strategies: a result that would tend to demonstrate that “organizations are increasingly using the Cloud in an organized and strategic way rather than opportunistically.” This is also true for SaaS, which is no longer confined to less strategic areas. Nearly “eight out of ten organizations that use SaaS consider at least one of their SaaS applications to be strategic to their business,” according to the barometer, which “confirms that SaaS is not just a stopgap measure or an unimportant add-on.
Security – There are many reasons not to use the cloud, but the main one remains the same and far ahead of the others: security. These fears have become even more pronounced and are considered important by nearly two-thirds of respondents, compared to less than 50% six months earlier. However, these fears are often unfounded, according to PAC.
For the firm, this feeling of insecurity is “regularly fueled by high-profile operational incidents, hacker attacks, or even international espionage cases, such as that of the NSA.
Public cloud – For PAC, the need for proximity expressed by companies is reflected in the search for local service providers. “This desire to deal with suppliers is clearly illustrated by our surveys. The criterion of the location of the datacenters is on the rise,
The importance of proximity for users is more than tangible. “The firm assures us that this expectation includes both Cloud providers and service providers. Local roots are important, both in the public and private clouds.