Enterprises focused on internal clouds: Study

Almost half of enterprises are planning internal cloud projects in 2013, according to a new cloud computing study from TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research.

The study found that 47 per cent of respondents said the internal cloud was among their top two cloud-related projects of 2013. Conducted during the second half of 2012, TheInfoPro study identifies major initiatives and explores several fundamental areas, including implementation plans for more than 12 technologies, macro IT influences transforming the sector, drivers of cloud adoption, and provider-selection criteria.

Some key trends from study include:

• The cloud has really become a proxy for internal transformation, as adoption of technologies like virtualization and efforts to radically standardize and consolidate have all been classified as ‘cloud’ initiatives.
• In 2013, enterprises will likely remain focused on building internal environments that mimic the functionality of highly efficient cloud service providers.
• Many enterprises remain skeptical as to whether they can actually save money by using the public cloud. End-users expect greater savings from their internal cloud efforts, with 36 per cent expecting savings of between 1 per cent and 10 per cent from their internal cloud efforts, and that much of the expected savings will come as a result of increased automation.

“The Digital Infrastructure of the future will provide CIOs with an assortment of service delivery venues, which will enable users to schedule or automate the delivery of workloads to the most suitable internal or external clouds depending on workload characteristics, SLAs and policy requirements,” said Peter ffoulkes, TheInfoPro’s Research Director for Cloud Computing. “As IT organizations complete their infrastructure virtualization and automation projects and turn toward cloud initiatives, there will be significant upside opportunity for a veritable host of cloud service and cloud enabling technology vendors over the next two years.”