Why is 54 per cent of UK enterprise workload still on-premise with no cloud?

Find out in our new 'cloud balancing' research paper

Clouds... — Have you moved to the hybrid cloud yet (or any cloud)?

Peter Gothard
24 April 2017

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Despite the hype surrounding cloud computing, 54 per cent of UK enterprises' IT functions are still run entirely on-premise, with no cloud services in sight.

This leaves only 23 per cent of organisations on private cloud, 18 per cent in public cloud and only five per cent utilising the newer notion of hybrid cloud: ie. integration of both public and private cloud technology.

These statistics come from Computing's new research paper Cloud mix and match - getting the balance right, produced in association with ‘hyper-converged' infrastructure firm Nutanix.

When it comes to public cloud, 44 per cent of respondents said that any use of public cloud in their organisation was due to an "officially sanctioned" organisational strategy move, which is at least an encouraging indicator that the public cloud is now being taken seriously a secure and convenient option.

Nevertheless, respondents cited "compliance with statutory regulations" as the main reason to choose cloud, intimating private over public as a choice, although "pressure to be able to react quickly to changing business needs" came a close second.

This adds almost as much weight for a public cloud which - on a very basic level - is going to allow users to react faster and in a more convenient fashion than many private cloud offerings, bogged down as they often are in slow-moving regulatory thinking.

To be more specific, 36 per cent of respondents rated the speed of deployment of public cloud over private cloud, with one-third citing the ‘pay as you go' nature of public cloud as placing it above private cloud as a choice.

A not inconsiderable 29 per cent rated the "agility" of public cloud over private.

At this point, the argument for a hybrid form of private and public cloud seems a viable option indeed, but only 14 per cent of respondents are currently even pursuing (note: not actually using) hybrid cloud approaches.

But as with anything new (even cloud itself), concerns remain about ease of management, not to mention stakeholders disagreeing on what sort of arrangement should take prominence.

Read the paper to find out more about the current state of the industry with hybrid cloud, and possible solutions.

It still looks like a long road ahead, but it can definitely said many minds are now at least waking up to the possibilities.