Companies in South-East Asia and around the world are flocking to leading cloud-computing services such as Amazon Web Services in record numbers, lured by greater efficiencies and far lower costs, a new survey reveals.
The study, by digital media company IDG Enterprise, found that 69 percent of firms surveyed had switched their IT infrastructure from in-house to the cloud, representing a 12 percent increase in the number of companies making the transition in the last two years.
In large corporations – those with at least 1,000 employees – investments in cloud computing had risen by 19 percent, with an average US$3.3 million being spend on data centre services annually, according to the IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study 2014. Indeed, such is the rush by enterprises to cloud-based computing solutions that the study projects that in 2015, around 24 percent of IT budgets will be for cloud computing.
Companies are being drawn to cloud computing because of a range of clear advantages that allow them to be more competitive in the marketplace. These include the enormous computing power of data centres, which employ the latest hardware and software technologies and handle all the IT support and requirements – meaning client firms get cutting-edge services and assistance and don’t have to have their own IT staff.
Substantial savings are also realised in the much lower costs of operating in the cloud instead of on the firm’s own premises – even data centres’ power and server idle times deliver far greater economies of scale than individual networks ever could. High levels of security and up-time are additional attractions for firms, as is ease of use, as programs and databases can be accessed and run from anywhere in the world.
Even better news is that as the cloud-computing sector grows dramatically, stiff competition between Amazon Web Services and the other major players means more services are being added while pricing is coming down all the time.
Among the other main findings of the IDG Enterprise study – which involved over 1,600 firms in a range of industries – are that 56 percent of companies are still trying to find out which of their IT operations should be hosted in the cloud, and that 38 percent had identified the relevant areas and were comfortable hosting them in the cloud.
For a more in-depth look at the study on cloud migrations, visit www.idgenterprise.com/report/idg-enterprise-cloud-computing-study-2014.
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