Cloud Condenses To Reality

On TechWeekEurope, we normally have a low tolerance for cloud computing surveys. Any given week, one or two cloud vendors will usually email us, and phone us (and usually phone us again…) about yet another bit of market research that puports to prove their particular brand of cloud computing is just what users are crying out for.

This sort of research is the last resort of the vendor with no news to report. “Nothing’s happening,” says the PR. “Let’s do a survey. Maybe Peter and the TechWeekTeam haven’t got anything better to write about!”

Cooling the cloud hype

Cloud is particularly prone to this, as it’s been such an amorphous subject. Hard news points are difficult to come by and when you have one it is even harder to explain and put across, because cloud partnerships and products are addressing new kinds of issues, which don’t slot easily into existing patterns.

So, over the last couple of years, a lot of firms have found it easier to turn out press releases, which usually show that the customers don’t really know what is going on, but their confusion can be crafted into a headline.

The Cisco Cloudwatch survey drops into this category of course – Cisco makes the physical networks on which cloud services will depend, so it wants to prove that busineses are gagging to buy cloud services. And sure enough, this week’s Cloudwatch does exactly that, finding acceptance surged from around 50 percent to 90 percent.

Have cloud perceptions changed?

Now, that’s the headline figure, and unsurprisingly Cisco makes play with it. But what else can we do with the figures?

What interests me is that Cloudwatch does have one thing that not everyone else does – and that is two years of data. With that, we can have a stab at looking at the way cloud perceptions are changing.

The survey is based on 250 people who are billed as “IT decision makers”. Roughly speaking, that means people Cisco hopes might buy its kit. The respondents are in five vertical markets (retail, service providers, finance, government and healthcare) and they were asked the same questions last year and this year.

The interesting thing is that, while many more people said they have cloud on their agenda, their expectations of the cloud seemed to be significantly lower. Last year, they listed the benefits of the cloud, including things like cost, time to market, and ease of updating.

This year, they listed those benefits again. And in virtually every case, for each of those benefits, fewer IT people actually expected to achieve it.

Why the rush to the cloud?

But, if IT people are more sceptical about the benefits of the cloud, why are more expecting to adopt it? How does that compute?

Well, even having declined in the last year, most of those benefits still get a decent score. Cost savings are still expected by 57 percent (the same as last year) and security actually got a boost. Last year, the idea that the cloud might increase your security was a laughable minority opinion (27 percent believed it). Today, 37 percent of Cisco’s survey think the cloud will make them more secure.

Elsewhere, the barriers to the cloud are ranked. And while security is still one of them, all of them have also decreased.

It is tempting to explain the “surge” in support thus. “Expectations of the cloud have fallen. But fear of the cloud has fallen faster.”

It’s not that people expect more, they just realise the barriers are lower than they feared. IT departments are not afraid of the cloud any more, and actually seem to understand it more.

Of course, they still have a lot more understanding to do. In response to one question, Cisco reports that 32 percent of the IT people it spoke to believe their colleagues in other departments are using the cloud without informing them. That is up from 21 percent last year, but I believe it is still a ludicrous underestimate,

“Armed with a credit card at Amazon, you can get a mini data centre up and running within minutes,” said Cisco’s UK CTO Ian Foddering. It is indeed that easy and I’m sure that is what users are doing if their IT department won’t give them what they need.

In fact, let’s check out the figures, with a quick poll, presented below…

There is one final result from the survey that shows how far the perception has come and how far it still has to go. Last year, less than half the survey could tell the difference between cloud computing and managed services. This year that figure is up to 72 percent.

So, despite everyone’s efforts, more than a quarter of organisations STILL don’t know what the cloud is. Shall we all get on with the education process?

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