Cloud computing is all the rage at Interop this year. There are keynote sessions devoted to it, plenty of educational sessions. You’ve got a whole host of cloud vendors here. It seems like just about every vendor on the floor has found a way to jam the word cloud into their marketing material.
So who is adopting cloud computing? Well, if you include software-as-a-service (SaaS), which has been swept up into the cloud marketing vortex, cloud computing is taking off, I suppose. About 41% of Interop attendees are using SaaS products like Salesforce.com, according to a survey of 104 IT pros conducted at Interop by Network Instruments.
Twenty-nine percent of attendees have deployed a private cloud. I’d be interested in learning from these survey respondents what they mean by a private cloud. I talked to the CIO of a midmarket firm late last year who said he’s basically been running a private cloud out of his data center for six or seven years… long before anyone was talking about the cloud. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
A small number (19%) of respondents said they are actually using the most-hyped of all cloud computing models, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), from providers like Amazon.
So plenty of folks are using some shape or form of cloud computing. Granted some of them might have another name for it: SaaS, ASP, hosted service provider, etc, etc.
What sort of concerns do they have about the cloud? Network Instruments asked their survey respondents about that, too.
- Twenty-two percent say they lack the tools to monitor and manage cloud activity.
- Twelve percent say they are unable to resolve delays caused by cloud providers.
- Twenty-seven percent are worried that cloud computing services will bust their Internet bandwidth budgets.
On the flipside, 33% of respondents see cloud computing as a way to lower infrastructure costs and 30% see it offering them more flexibility to deal with changing business demands.
