OZ Business computing is heading skywards, new research suggests, with 20% of Aussie business now using cloud. The most apparent difference in 2011 is the broader uptake of cloud services by CIOs from both SME and enterprises.
 Click to enlarge |
20.6% of Aussie business questioned are currently using cloud with another 32.4% planning to move over to it in the next 6 -12 months, according to IDC’s APEJ Cloud End-User Survey.
The survey was conducted among over 100 Australian businesses with the most apparent difference in 2011 is the broader uptake of cloud services by CIOs and business unit managers from both SME and enterprise-scale organisations across Australia.
And cloud looks to be a-growing even further with the remaining 41.2% of firms planning to move to cloud in 2012.
And it looks like Aussie’s cloud savviness is accurate – a recent Cloud Readiness Index conducted by Asia Cloud Computing Association placed Australia in the No 4 spot behind Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
Almost one third of cloud plans in Australia will be based around a vPC or virtual private clouds – are cloud services provided through a secured network by a service provider providing to multiple organisations.
Virtual services are seen as a way of mitigating some of the risk fears by early mainstream public cloud users regarding security and reliability.
However, cloud services is just one ingredient of the emerging ‘third platform’, say IDC, which also includes mobile devices like iPad’s and business applications.
“The third platform’s ingredients are mobile devices and apps expanding the edge of the digital world beyond PCs; cloud services replacing the client/server model as new architecture for solution delivery; and mobile broadband – 4G and beyond.”
“Big data” analytics and social technologies are also part of the new emerging platform.
“The overall IT services market is certainly evolving in multiple ways, most notably by the rapid emergence of cloud-enabled, and cloud-amplifying technologies such as, the ever-expanding ‘species’ of mobile applications, new mobile devices, growing availability of wireless broadband, and explosion of big data tools”, says Raj Mudaliar, Senior Market Analyst, IDC.
Cloud services revenue here is to experience a massive fourfold jump – from $470.3m in 2010, to $2,030m in 2015 – growing at an annual 34%.
This forecast applies to five major categories of public IT cloud services: Applications, Application Development and Deployment (AD&D), Systems Infrastructure Software, Basic Storage and Servers.
“IDC predicts the emergence of a sizeable opportunity to provide professional services around cloud assessment, planning, workload migration, security best practices, governance, and test case procedures. This is expected to consistently grow during the forecast period.”
