When it comes to migrating their workloads to the cloud, many businesses begin with data storage services, reveals a new study from Zetta.
Disaster recovery (DR) is the number one application (36 percent) that businesses plan to move to cloud, according to a survey of 385 IT professionals conducted by the cloud backup company. File sharing and data backup are tied for second place (30 percent) followed closely by general data storage (29 percent).
Apart from the cost benefits associated with the cloud, businesses are seeking ways to relieve some of the management challenges of maintaining disaster recovery and data storage services, according to Jeff Whitehead, CTO of Zetta.
“Lower cost is typically the most common benefit cited for cloud adoption, but interestingly it followed well behind other key application migration advantages in our recent survey. This shows that increasingly IT is looking to the cloud as a way to not only reduce hard expenses, but also to reduce the burden on staff,” Whitehead said in a statement. “The cloud is transforming more complex applications such as DR which have traditionally been considered expensive and time-consuming to implement and manage.”
Underscoring the cloud’s rapid ascent in the market for enterprise IT scene, a majority of organizations (88 percent) said they were using cloud applications and services. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they plan to migrate even more applications to the cloud within 12 months.
Somewhat mirroring the short-term cloud migration plans of businesses, backup (60 percent), file sharing (48 percent) and general storage (30 percent) are among the top cloud services currently in use. Also popular are cloud productivity suites like Office 365 (72 percent) and email (52 percent).
Not all workloads are well-suited to the cloud, at least not yet. More than half of the survey takers (54 percent) said they had no plans to migrate their financial and accounting applications. Many also expressed a reluctance to place their custom and in-house applications (44 percent) and data storage applications in the cloud.
That reticence mainly comes down to security concerns (62 percent). Bucking conventional wisdom, 44 percent were worried about the cost of shifting those workloads to the cloud. Finally, 33 percent cited compliance as a reason why some of their applications won’t be served out of a cloud data center any time soon.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
