• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, April 6, 2016

According to a technology survey just released by Evolve IP, 91% of all organizations now have at least one service in the cloud, and eight in 10 IT professionals and executives believe that when facing hardware malfunctions and environmental disasters, their organization’s data is safer in the cloud than on premises. In addition, six in 10 believe the same when facing a malicious attack.

Data security is an ongoing concern for executives, and, when questioned about data environments, 50% believe that a private cloud is safest when compared to public clouds or an on premise data center. Specifically, when asked about physical disasters (environmental or hardware failure):

• 55% felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 27.5% in a public cloud and 17.5% on premise
• Looking at malicious attacks, 52% preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data versus 38% on premise and 10% public cloud

Other key results of the survey showed thatborganizations have an average of nearly five services in the cloud, a significant increase from the 2.7 services found in last year’s results. Additionally, the survey indicated that adoption will continue to be strong, with 74.5% of respondents planning on adding new or additional cloud services in the next three years.

The survey results also showed that 53% of organizations had deployed a cloud solution on their own, up from 43% in 2014. However, 48.5% said they would outsource to a solution provider the next time if they had to start the deployment over.

Additional Findings:

• Just over 1/3 of survey respondents noted that individual departments like Sales, Marketing, Operations and HR had deployed a cloud service independently. However, of those installations, IT was only involved about half of the time.
• Over the last three years, respondents’ impressions of the maturity of the cloud has changed. In 2013, one out of four respondents felt that the cloud was an immature technology. Today, just one in 10 feel the same, says the report
• Five in 10 respondents would prefer to rely on a single cloud provider versus having a unique provider for each service
• The top services survey respondents expect to deploy in the cloud over the next three years are servers/data centers (22.5%), phone systems (21.5%) disaster recovery (21%), Finance / ERP (18.5%) and co-location/backup (17%)

Guy Fardone, President and Founding Partner of Evolve IP, concludes that “… this year’s survey… shows continued momentum for the deployment of cloud services… (as) the average number of services deployed in the cloud by an individual organization jumped significantly… driving factors behind this increase (are)… an alignment between executives and IT managers about the value of the cloud… (and) nine out of 10 respondents feel that the cloud is now a mature technology… alleviating many concerns about reliability and customer experience…”

The blind, web-based survey of 1,080 respondents in North America, conducted by Evolve IP during December of 2015, featured 84% of the respondents from companies with between 50 and 5,000 employees, 10.5% were businesses with 11-49 associates and 5.5% were small businesses with 10 employees or less.

For additional information from EvolveIP, please visit here.