Cloud computing is maturing and organizations are gaining more experience with the platforms and services it provides. Recent research shows use of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings increasing across the U.S. and Europe, and overwhelming, the experiences are positive. CA Technologies commissioned research firm Vanson Bourne to survey some 340 European organizations with at least one year’s experience with the various flavors of cloud computing to better understand the state of the market. The results showed organizations seeing much success with the cloud, yet a closer look at the data proves there is still much to learn about operating in the cloud.

Denise Dubie, Principal of Strategic Content at CA Technologies, spoke with Vanson Bourne Director Kevin Withnall (KW) and Project Manager Jimmy Mortimer (JM) to read between the lines of the survey results.

CA Technologies in part conducted this survey to gain a better understanding of the challenges still present with cloud computing, yet the results were overwhelmingly positive. Was this a surprise to you?

JM: The key point to bear in mind here is that the study was focused on those who had already adopted cloud or at least were in the early stages of testing cloud. In terms of challenges, you would hope to see that large numbers of the organizations had prepared properly and had overcome any challenges they encountered. From that point of view, the results are not so surprising. There were some minor challenges highlighted.

Can you elaborate on the challenges those organizations surveyed experienced?

JM: One area that seems to come up more often than others is this idea of higher than anticipated costs, which you can relate to the early adoption of cloud. It’s the kind of challenge you’d experience in the early stages of cloud and that rings true for those who have gained real experience with the cloud; they’ve kind of broken through that pain barrier.

KW: Another weakness with the cloud strategy we saw is that some organizations were expecting cloud to take the chores away from their IT department so they could focus on the brain surgery elements of IT infrastructure, rather than on the screwdriver elements. And they were perhaps disappointed. It’s a low percentage, somewhere around 13 percent who voiced that opinion, but that is one thing that stuck out as a challenge for these organizations.

Would you say these misperceptions regarding cost and the amount of work that would be eliminated with cloud are due to end users confusing cloud computing with a full-blown outsourcing solution?

KW: Yes I think there is a cycle here that cloud has been going through early stages of test and development so organizations are trying out the concept and seeing if it works. As they become more mature with their cloud adoption, then we might anticipate a greater uptake of, perhaps, not a full outsourcing solution, but certainly a solution that removes a whole host of legacy systems from an organization – which clearly would impact how that is managed and how that is run within the organization.

The research revealed that the desired benefits or ultimate goals of adopting cloud change the longer an organization is using it. Can you explain why that seems to happen in these surveyed organizations?

JM: Simply put, as you explore cloud more and more, you can push the limits of what you can do. The benefits start around cost and then they get geared a bit more towards innovation, a benefit which is a lot more difficult to define. The economic situation of the last several years has created a key sentence in decision-making: will it save us money or will it make us money? Obviously IT departments also have to bear this in mind when they’re pitching ideas and trying to increase spend for things such as cloud adoption. Some organizations, perhaps thanks to cloud, have been able to move their stuff away from chores. They spend less time firefighting and move more in the direction of innovation or some other way of developing their skills further. You find benefits both in terms of having more time to explore new things, but also the kind of knock-on effect of having fewer problems to solve.

Also the study didn’t directly touch on this, but did you find any results of interest in terms of vertical markets in your research?

KW: Yes. Finance is the prime industry that recognizes the value of technology virtually from day one. You can’t operate a large financial-based organization in that industry without having technology, whereas with other industries technology is considered a cost and may always be. Finance recognizes that technology has to be at the forefront of the operation, and therefore, across any study we do, we see finance at the vanguard of technology uptake – not matter what the subject. That is usually the case. And as a contrast to that, if we’re conducting public sector research or we’re conducting manufacturing research, both of those industries tend to be somewhat latent. Retail also, historically, has been somewhat slow in its uptake of technology.

And what we’ve seen with cloud is that all of those other three industries as well as other industries responded similarly to the results – suggesting that there is a uniformity of response to the cloud opportunity. The common response from the sectors was a surprise to me and is unusual. It’s very unusual. Most of the surveys, bar this one, have some degree of industry variation, which is notable.

What’s the next step for these experienced cloud computing users? Are there challenges on the horizon?

KW: It seems that a challenge for cloud is that those legacy systems will continue to exist. Mainframe, for instance, clearly requires a machine that has a physical place. It’s not cloud technology. We didn’t ask these organizations about their non-cloud infrastructure, but they would have to write off elements of that legacy system. In order to increase cloud adoption rates, one would imagine they have to write off that legacy system and be comfortable that the organization, at an enterprise level, can continue to survive without disaster, without a need for the mainframe. I think that will be a quite a chasm for organizations – large organizations that are heavily technology-dependent – to cross.

CA Technologies released research that suggested end-user organizations were considering how to use cloud and mainframe technology together. Are organizations simply too heavily invested to abandon existing infrastructure for cloud?

KW: Yes. What we didn’t do with this survey is see what else was being used within these organizations. That would have been quite intriguing. For instance, what we have discovered in looking at cloud in one or two Asian countries, principally China, is that because they don’t have that infrastructure, the positive attitude toward cloud is even more apparent and more overwhelming than observed in the study we ran, which covered Europe. If I might call them emerging territories or emerging markets, this infrastructure doesn’t quite exist and that is an interesting paradigm when compared with the European and perhaps the U.S. experience.

How would you advise those considering cloud to use these survey results in their decision-making process?

JM: The results of this survey show that cloud is not just about saving costs. It’s not just about releasing workers from mundane, day-to-day tasks. There are so many potential benefits and most organizations aren’t yet able to take advantage of all of them. That just shows organizations adopting cloud that they need to thoroughly research every possible angle they can to take full advantage of cloud. This study shows the potential of what you can do beyond what was originally thought possible.

Organizations are going to start being a little more imaginative as to how they use cloud and how they think they can take advantage of it. Perhaps they’re starting to move away from it being an optional bolt-on to something that is slightly more intrinsic in organizations. In a decade, cloud will seem perfectly natural.

Taking the next steps into the cloud

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