Private clouds are moving rapidly from concept to production as fears about expertise and integration wane, in accordance with our new survey.
It’s been 20 months since our last InformationWeek Private Cloud Survey, and boy have things changed. In that point, the proportion of enterprises reporting functional private clouds greater than doubled, from 21% to 47%.
What’s equally amazing is that, in April 2012, 30% of survey respondents were only starting cloud projects. A 26-percentage-point increase in shops with functional clouds implies that most of these plans that were at the strategy planning stage two years ago made it into production. We almost never see organizations move so fast on a brand new technology.
If private cloud technology ever went through Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment,” it was short-lived. Rather, the celebrities were aligned for strong growth. The OpenStack Foundation was incorporated six months after our 2012 survey, and CloudStack, an open-source private cloud suite that’s been battling it out with Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was released to the general public about a months before. Meantime, a completely functional version of VMware’s vSphere, rolled out in early 2011 with support for Windows Server 2008, RHEL 6, SLES 11, Ubuntu, and Solaris, was hitting its stride. VSphere 5 hit the market in July 2011 with some very useful capabilities, including storage virtualization and information protection.
While our survey shows some vendor winners and losers, what’s more interesting is a swing in keen on which private cloud technologies are most beneficial. Either unique needs drove early adopters, or the technology itself has evolved in the way it tackles modern datacenter problems, whilst users were happily moving from project to production.
We think both are true. Early adopters likely realized they were spending an excessive amount of time on typical datacenter plate-spinning and turned to the automation that incorporates private clouds to handle that problem.
Yet two years ago, the technology was away from baked. VMware, meanwhile, has (fairly quietly) been building its private cloud arsenal; for many private cloud adherents, here is go. VMware’s software isn’t inexpensive, however the only way IT gets to work on new initiatives is by automating the old stuff, and that makes the price worthwhile.
The current satisfaction with private clouds seems to return on the expense of public and hybrid models. We saw a five-point increase within the percentage of respondents saying they’re phasing out their public cloud use. Of these who said in our 2012 survey that they are using or planning to exploit the general public cloud, 11% said “no” to the hybrid cloud model. That percentage has increased to 19% now. This modification is probably going as a result nature of non-public cloud users today (most IT shops) compared with then (early adopters who want to experiment).
The public cloud may be great for business continuity purposes, but tools able to duplicating and deploying internal systems into the general public cloud are only now coming to market. VMware has its own public cloud offering, but its prices aren’t yet based on Amazon’s and its main rivals — and so they likely won’t be if the Google-driven price wars sustain. Most enterprises can organize their disaster recovery across company-owned or blue-chip colocation sites.
Resistance is futile?
Why are private cloud abstainers — the 23% of survey respondents who say they are not pursuing the technology — holding back? Typically, their needs aren’t pressing enough to justify the disruption.
Back in 2012, the most important reason behind not pursuing a personal cloud was that other projects took priority. Other reasons: A cloud model didn’t support their applications; they lacked the budget; they did not see a necessity. Twenty percent of respondents said they just hadn’t considered a non-public cloud.
Today’s top answer is “little need,” followed by “investigated it and located it not a fit.” Sometimes when things aren’t broke, you do not fix them. The proportion saying they haven’t considered private cloud fell from 20% in 2012 to simply 9% in our recent survey. The share of respondents who say they’ve investigated private cloud but found it too untested has doubled, from 6% in 2012 to twelve% now.
The current private cloud avoiders are classic, well, laggards. They are saying they’ll move to a non-public cloud when the technology they’re using not supports the business. What would persuade them to think about moving faster? Significant operational and capital expense savings.
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