64% of U.S. companies will spend at least 15% more on public cloud infrastructure in 2015, according to 2nd Watch’s latest survey that ran online the last two weeks in November and was completed by 425 IT managers and executives at large and midsize companies in the United States.
The responses would indicate growing confidence in cloud hosting infrastructure and expanding budgets for public cloud workloads. More than half (54%) of companies polled will invest 15 to 25% more next year on public cloud infrastructure, and 10% will increase public cloud infrastructure budgets by 30% or more.
Meanwhile, consistent cost savings derived from the use of public cloud infrastructure versus corporate-owned datacenters was cited as the biggest potential benefit to running more public cloud workloads in 2015.
Additional highlights of the survey include:
- The most popular enterprise IT trend next year will be hybrid cloud (36%), followed by Big Data (20%), Internet of Things (18%), mobility (12%), software-defined data center (9%) and containers (4%).
- As ever, enterprise cloud job skills are in high demand. Companies are most interested in IT workers with experience managing public cloud workloads (34%), followed by networking and storage experts (18%), Big Data specialists (13%), traditional migration consultants (13%) and enterprise architects (11%).
- IT also wants more innovation from enterprise cloud software providers, citing security tools and services as the most under-invested category (32%), followed by performance monitoring and system management tools (26%) and configuration and change management tools (22%).
“It’s no surprise that enterprise organizations will be investing more in the public cloud next year, given the level of innovation occurring right now at companies like Amazon,” said Doug Schneider, CEO at 2nd Watch. “Yet clearly, companies need help in critical areas like workload management and security, and the market will need to deliver on those promises to help further enterprise cloud adoption and ROI.”
2nd Watch is a public cloud workload management company that helps enterprises accelerate adoption of the public cloud. The company’s services and tools extend and automate critical workload management processes for the public cloud, including governance, procurement, migration and administration. The venture-backed company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.
