Cloud Adoption Now ‘Woven Into Fabric’ Of All Verticals

Research has found that workloads in nearly every kind of function in every kind of industry are being migrated to the cloud, as on-premise workloads become the exception.

The study from security vendor HyTrust found that 47 percent of critical server workloads in financial services, banking, insurance, and trading are now on cloud, with 55 percent of critical server workloads in healthcare, biotech and life sciences running on cloud.

In technology companies, that figure of virtualised critical server workloads also stands at 55 percent.

The figures are around the same for non-critical workloads too, HyTrust found, such as development server workloads, directory services systems, network, and storage.

HyTrust said that what was once a gradual migration in select verticals is now a broad-scale, aggressive adoption.

Basic fabric

“Without much fanfare, this critical technology advance has become woven into the basic fabric of businesses large and small,” said Eric Chiu, president of HyTrust.

“The potential of virtualisation and the cloud was always undeniable, but there was genuine concern over security and skepticism regarding the processes required. What we find in this research is that the challenges are being overcome, and every kind of function in every kind of industry is being migrated.

“There are some holdouts, to be sure, but they’re now the exception, and we’re betting they won’t stay that way for long,” he added.

That isn’t to say that the inevitable security concerns about cloud have been eliminated, though.

HyTrust found that in those companies that have moved to the software-defined data centre, worries about data security and breaches ran quite high, with more than half of companies across verticals such as financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and telecoms holding security anxieties.

Interestingly, out of the organisations looking to move to public cloud in 2016, there was a transatlantic split between preferred providers.

The most popular planned implementation in 2016 for customers in the United States is Microsoft Azure, but customers in the UK favoured Amazon Web Services.

And half as many in the UK (13 percent) say they’ll use VMware vCloudAir than those in the US (26 percent).

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