A recent survey of U.S. IT and business executives shows that CIOs are the C-suite executives most intensively advocating and driving migration of their organizations' IT resources to the cloud. According to the survey by Unisys Corporation, CIOs’ primary motivation for moving to the cloud are reducing costs and gaining faster access to computing capacity. Securing the cloud is the primary management concern.
The following are the factors that respondents cite as the primary motivators for cloud migration:
- Cost reduction/transforming capital expenses to operating expenses: 63 percent
- Enabling computing capacity on demand: 62 percent
- Freeing IT staff to perform more high-value work: 51 percent
- Changing the perception of IT from cost center to competitive advantage: 33 percent
The survey shows that the respondents' organizations are moving steadily to realize the value they anticipate from the cloud: 67 percent see at least half of their IT resources in the cloud within the next two years, while 44 percent see more than 75 percent residing there within that time.
Forty-two percent of survey respondents view security as the greatest cloud-management issue their organizations face. Their response shows that concern about adequate cloud security, which executives have expressed in many earlier studies, remains an issue more than a decade after cloud computing gained widespread recognition as a major platform for delivery of IT services.
To a lesser extent, the respondents foresee cloud management giving rise to operational challenges as well – especially lack of integration among multiple platforms (16 percent) and lack of cross-platform visibility (10 percent).
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Google collectively control more than half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market, Synergy found, with an overwhelming lead by AWS, which held a 31-percent share in the second quarter, reports CIO magazine. Microsoft came next with 11 percent, while IBM weighed in at 8 percent, and Google came in with 5 percent.
“Amazon and the other big three players have distanced themselves from the competition in this market and continue to widen the gap,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director with Synergy told CIO. “What marks them out as different is their global presence, marketing muscle, ability to fund huge investments in hyperscale data centers and, in most cases, a determination to succeed in the market."