SANTA BARBARA, CA — (Marketwired) — 04/25/13 — RightScale® Inc., a leader in today announced the results of its second annual State of the Cloud survey. The 2013 results showed broad adoption of cloud computing — with enterprises now adopting at higher rates than smaller companies. Survey respondents continued to show a strong interest in multi-cloud strategies, with plans to evaluate and use a broad range of public and private cloud options. For the first time, RightScale categorized respondents based on a new Cloud Maturity Model. The Model uncovered a cloud value imperative: companies reported more benefits and fewer challenges with expanded adoption of cloud computing.
The full results of the survey are available in the RightScale 2013 State of the Cloud Report at .
“In our 2013 State of the Cloud survey, we were able to gather meaningful insights as to how an organization-s level of cloud maturity impacts both the benefits they are able to realize and the challenges they perceive,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “The results reveal a clear : more cloud adoption unlocks more cloud value. The survey results align with our experience at RightScale helping companies to begin or expand their cloud initiatives. The data shows that investments in cloud adoption will continue to drive increased value for their business.”
The survey was conducted in the first quarter of 2013 and included 625 respondents from development, IT and business roles across a wide range of company sizes and industries, including financial services, media and publishing, education, digital agencies, and software companies.
In this survey, RightScale introduced a Cloud Maturity Model in order to segment and analyze companies based on their level of cloud adoption. Respondents were categorized into the following four cloud maturity levels:
are developing cloud strategies and plans but have not yet implemented cloud projects. (17 percent of respondents).
are new to cloud computing and are working on proof-of-concepts or first projects (26 percent of respondents).
have implemented some cloud projects and are running applications in the cloud. (23 percent of respondents).
respondents are heavily using cloud computing and using it a strategic initiative to transform business. (26 percent of respondents).
The remaining 8 percent of respondents were not planning to use cloud.
The top benefits reported in the survey are faster access to infrastructure, greater scalability, faster time to market with apps, and higher availability. Organizations report that they are realizing significantly more benefits as they progress from Cloud Beginner to Cloud Explorers to Cloud Focused. As an example, 30 percent of Cloud Beginners reported that they were gaining faster access to infrastructure, while 87 percent of Cloud Focused respondents realized that same benefit. In addition, respondents reported that challenges such as security, governance, and compliance declined as cloud maturity increased. For example, security is reported as a significant challenge by 38 percent of Cloud Beginners, but only 18 percent of the experienced, Cloud Focused, respondents.
Companies of all sizes continue to adopt cloud computing. However, larger enterprises with more than 1,000 employees were slightly more likely to claim some level of cloud adoption (77 percent) versus smaller companies (73 percent).
In addition, larger organizations are choosing multi-cloud (77 percent) with the majority of those (47 percent) choosing hybrid cloud strategies. Enterprises with hybrid cloud strategies are making progress toward their goals, with 61 percent of those organizations already running apps in public cloud, 38 percent in private cloud and 29 percent in hybrid cloud environment.
DevOps has taken hold in 54 percent of companies surveyed with adoption split between at the project level (25 percent), indicating a bottom up approach, and the corporate or business unit level (29 percent), indicating a top-down mandate. The survey revealed that DevOps adoption goes hand-in-hand with cloud maturity, with more than 75 percent of Cloud Focused respondents reporting adoption of DevOps vs. 56 percent of Cloud Explorers, 53 percent of Cloud Beginners and 41 percent of Cloud Watchers.
Configuration management tools, such as Chef and Puppet, can be one element in a DevOps approach. 33 percent of respondents were using Chef or Puppet or both. The two solutions were battling for market share with each product appealing to different segments of the market. Chef leads Puppet among developers (Chef 24 percent vs Puppet 14 percent) and smaller organizations (Chef 23 percent vs Puppet 15 percent). However Puppet leads Chef among IT/Ops professionals (Puppet 24 percent vs Chef 20 percent) and in companies with more than 1,000 employees (Puppet 28 percent vs Chef 21 percent).
RightScale provides technology and services to help companies move along the path to cloud maturity. RightScale works with Cloud Watchers who need strategy consulting, Cloud Beginners needing tools and assistance to deploy their first cloud applications and more mature Cloud Explorers and Cloud Focused organizations who want to scale out their use of cloud.
The full RightScale 2013 State of the Cloud report is available here: .
Michael Crandell will discuss details of the report today, Thursday, April 25, at his RightScale Compute morning keynote. Follow it at #RightScaleCompute on Twitter.
The 2012 RightScale survey is available here:
RightScale® Inc., cloud management enables organizations to easily deploy and manage business-critical applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds. RightScale provides efficient configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications. RightScale supports 15 public and private clouds, which include AWS, Rackspace Open Cloud, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine, HP, SoftLayer, Logicworks, IDCF and Datapipe as well as private clouds based on OpenStack and CloudStack. Since 2006, millions of servers have been launched with the RightScale solution by leading enterprises including the Associated Press, CBS Interactive, Intercontinental Hotels Group, PBS, and Zynga.
RightScale is a registered trademark of RightScale, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Other product or company names mentioned may be trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.
Bret Clement
RightScale PR
805.243.3270
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