After a decade of cloud it may come as a surprise that the issue of Cloud computing is still perplexing to many CIOs. While Cloud computing is a foundation for digital business, Gartner estimates that less than one-third of enterprises have a documented cloud strategy.
“Cloud computing will become the dominant design style for new applications and for refactoring a large number of existing applications over the next 10-plus years,” said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “A cloud strategy clearly defines the business outcomes you seek, and how you are going to get there. Having a cloud strategy will enable you to apply its tenets quickly with fewer delays, thus speeding the arrival of your ultimate business outcomes.”
Ms. Scott highlighted three areas of focus in developing that strategy:
Enterprises are slowly migrating from on-premises data centers to the public cloud. Public cloud spending today is 5 percent of total IT spending, but it will grow much faster than internal IT spending through 2020, due to new initiatives as well as migration of existing legacy systems.
A key benefit of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) is to place applications closer to customers to enable a better user experience. Private cloud computing is also being exploited, especially where intellectual property, control, regulatory or compliance concerns, security, performance, and cost of service delivery are differentiated. In such cases, private clouds run on-premises, in co-location facilities or at provider facilities, and they can offer similar benefits to public cloud computing.
