The Shift to Cloud Computing Persists as Organizations Use Multiple Public Clouds

IDG’s 2020 Cloud Computing Study Outlines Cloud Usage & Adoption Plans, Along with Key Business Drivers

IDG Communications, Inc. – the world’s leading tech media, data, and marketing services company – releases the 2020 IDG Cloud Computing research, highlighting cloud usage and adoption plans, investments, and business drivers behind the technology. This year’s survey found that cloud computing is embedded into business strategy, as 92% of organization’s say their IT environment (infrastructure, applications, data analytics, etc.) is in the cloud to some extent today, and this is expected to grow to 95% 18 months from now.

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The Shift to Cloud Continues

Continuing to show the growth in cloud adoption, we are seeing a shift in IT environments being mostly on-premises to mostly cloud. When asked about their current IT environment, only 9% said their environment is all cloud, but this is expected to grow to 16% in 18 months. Looking at the mix of on premise and cloud-based environments, 54% said their total IT environment is mostly on-premises with some cloud (expected to decrease to 36% in 18 months) and 29% said mostly cloud with some on-premises (which is expected to grow to 43% in 18 months).

As businesses move more to the cloud, ITDMs state that 32% of their total IT budget will be allocated to cloud computing within the next year, which is up from 30% in 2018. From a dollar perspective, organizations will invest $73.8 million on average on cloud computing – this includes software, services, training and any other related costs that are attributed to cloud computing. Enterprise organizations (those with 1,000+ employees) plan to in invest $158M compared to $11.5M for SMBs (<1,000 employees).

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Status of Cloud-Based Applications

Thinking about their organization’s plans for building, employing or migrating applications/workloads to the cloud, ITDMs rank websites/web applications and collaboration and communication solutions high in the “currently migrating/deployed in the cloud” category (53% and 52%). Looking at what is likely to be migrated to the cloud in the next three years, disaster recovery/high availability (34%) and storage/archive/backup/file server (32%) top the list. New this year, we asked ITDMs if their organization has plans to move any applications or workloads from the cloud back to on-premises. More than a quarter (27%) have already or plan to move apps/workloads back to on-prem in the next 12 months.

“Gone are the days where IT managers get pushback for opting to deploy workloads in the cloud versus their own private data center,” says Eric Knorr, Editor in Chief, IDG Communications, Inc. “With its agility and scalability, especially during a time where cloud-based collaboration tools are essential for a successful remote work environment, cloud computing is showing a strong adoption curve. However, companies are also learning that their migrated applications need to be appropriately managed and optimized in order to meet their full expectations; hence the need for multi-cloud management tools and cloud specific roles.”

Further emphasizing the strong cloud adoption curve, organizations are choosing to implement cloud-first applications (those purpose-built for the cloud). This year’s research shows that 54% of organizations’ cloud-based applications moved from an on-premises environment to the cloud while 46% were purpose-built for the cloud.

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