Email. Smartphones. Tablets, Wi-Fi. Over time, products and services that we once considered cutting edge have become staples of our everyday life, tools we depend on to get the job done.
And now, the cloud is no exception.
In a recent Aberdeen Group study, all respondents revealed that they have deployed at least one public cloud service as part of their IT infrastructure, and 60 percent have done so for more than two years.
Public cloud services include a range of options:
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs), which manage IT services for one or more specific solution categories. Functionality may be delivered by on-premise systems, over the Internet, or a hybrid.
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which provides one or more specific applications over the Internet, eliminating the need for organizations to install, operate, and support these applications on their own company networks, servers, storage, and hosts.
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), which provides a fully virtualized computing environment for organizations to run their Internet-based applications, eliminating the need to install, operate, and support their own IT infrastructure including storage, servers, and hosts.
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which provides software services and application development interfaces, along with their underlying servers, networks, storage, and hosts. Organizations can use these to develop, test, and deploy their own Web-based apps.
Not surprisingly, technological expertise plays a crucial role in cloud employment. Aberdeen’s research shows that the public cloud adoption rates closely parallel the level of technical sophistication required for implementation. Managed Services and SaaS are the simplest, often requiring only an Internet connection and a valid credit card to initiate services. IaaS and PaaS require IT expertise to integrate cloud services with enterprise resources, and to be actively involved in managing them — and the adoption rates for these services are lower by about half.
Regardless of the type of public cloud service, nearly all respondents — 95 percent — reported that adoption has helped them significantly, both from an operational and financial perspective. Benefits reported include:
- A reduction in capital expense (60 percent of respondents)
- Fewer on-premise storage devices (52 percent of respondents)
- Fewer on-premise servers (34 percent of respondents)
- Flexibility to meet changes in demand for computing services (44 percent of respondents)
But implementing public cloud services alone is not enough — one core technology (or is this “key secret sauce” which connotes a different, appealing approach?) is essential to obtain the many benefits of these services. How can networks designed to support only internal capabilities evolve to integrate cloud services into their IT infrastructure? Find out in our next ThinkGig post.