More and more businesses are getting onto the cloud because of the many benefits they could get. Most businesses, more than eight in every ten, want the cloud to help them be more agile, maximize resources, pay lower for capital expense, have fewer operational issue, and implement new business models faster. This is according to a survey conducted by Triangle Publishing Services and Computerworld Strategic Marketing Services.

However, businesses are not jumping blindly onto the cloud bandwagon. They need to be sure that the cloud infrastructure they would be using would be able to meet their most important business needs in terms of manageability, reliability, integration, scalability and of course, performance. What’s more, business and IT leaders are making sure that going into the cloud would not land them in trouble as far as legal compliance, vendor lock in and viability and security is concerned.

This is majorly the reason why private clouds are now more popular than public cloud setups. Around 35% of businesses are now utilizing private cloud services for their workloads, compared to 12% for public cloud, where they share storage, server, networking and other resources with other customers. And close to half of all businesses are planning to go into the private cloud space in the next two years.

What types of cloud models are most businesses using? Software as a service is still king, but platform as a service models are showing continued and significant growth over the years. This is bolstered by the fact that PaaS is much easier and more affordable to run than when you use an infrastructure as a service model, where you would need to have a skilled IT team to administer it.

What’s fueling the popularity of private clouds more are the emergence of best practices and tools that are geared towards the more exacting applications that are used by businesses on private clouds. One of the top tools are based on Java, with around two-thirds of all respondents saying that the platform is what they use for their workloads on the cloud. Other platforms are .NET with around a fifth of respondents and other scripting languages with around 13 per cent. Java is a natural fit for the cloud and because most IT professionals now already know Java, there is no learning curve when they apply it for private clouds.

Use cases

What are businesses doing on the cloud? The most popular use case is with apps, with more than half of the responses indicating application development and application testing. Then you have businesses that are using the cloud to run their business critical applications, using it for analytics and other high performance computing. Cloud deployments are also being used for data retrieval and data storage. In the future, we are expecting more companies to deploy online transaction processing in the cloud, as well as use it for mobile app development.

Looking to get into the cloud for your business? Call Four Cornerstone today at 1 (817) 377 1144 and we can help you get your cloud deployments off the ground, as well as making sure that you get the best out of your cloud investments!

Photo by Blue Coat Photos.