A current study by Crisp Research including 716 IT decision makers shows a representative picture of the cloud adoption in the German (DACH) market. In 2014, the cloud has been embraced by IT departments. More than 74 percent of the companies are already planning and implementing cloud services and technologies in production environments. Only about one out of four (26 percent) of the surveyed said that at present and in the future the cloud is not an option for their company.
The cloud naysayers are primarily represented by small and medium-sized enterprises (more than 50 percent of all cloud naysayers are from companies with up to 500 employees). The number of companies from this domain who are actively planning or implementing cloud technologies is also significantly low. One reason for this is the low affinity for IT at enterprises of this size. Many small and medium-sized enterprises still do not understand the different IaaS, PaaS and SaaS possibilities and are not familiar with the offered cloud services. In addition, compared to bigger companies, the smaller ones place higher weight on the risk associated with use of cloud services. IT departments of larger companies are better equipped with protection measures and knowledge of IT security, and so feel less exposed to the risk of data misuse or loss.
Cloud naysayers are a dying species in large businesses with at least 5000 employees (less than 20 percent). IT managers are already implementing cloud operation processes and are looking for the most intelligent architectures as well as the most secure systems. For them the question is not “if” but rather “how” they can use cloud technologies.
According to the survey, companies with 5000 – 10000 employees are the frontrunner. The percentage of companies that describe the cloud as a solid element of their IT strategy and IT operations is around 39.5 – the peak in the study. For companies of this size, the number of cloud naysayers is also the lowest – only 16.3 percent.
In very large companies with more than 10000 employees cloud usage is flattening a little. There are various reasons for this. On the one hand, the increasing IT and organizational complexity lead to longer planning and implementation processes. Discussions of security and governance processes also take respectively more time and naturally lead to demands for higher standards, which sometimes cannot be fulfilled by the cloud provider. On the other hand, the tendency to develop own applications to manage individual software solutions and processes in this enterprise category is higher. The stronger financial resources and the availability of own, comprehensive data center capabilities allow for additional demands to be handled internally, even if the implementation is not as flexible and innovative as the internal users and departments require.
