Description

With our recently conducted 2018 Cloud User Survey, some patterns are beginning to emerge. Some workloads initially deployed in the public cloud are now being moved back into a premises data center, in a trend known as “repatriation.” And for the first time, we are seeing a decline in the number of businesses that use cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to deploy critical business applications—and a related uptick in managed cloud services, Software as a Service (SaaS), and old-fashioned hosting and co-location services for those applications. The findings indicate that more businesses are starting to make decisions regarding which deployment model is optimal for specific business applications.

In this report, we present and analyze findings from the 2018 Frost & Sullivan Cloud User Survey of IT decision-makers regarding placement of business workloads. For four common business workload categories—Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resources (HR) management, and business productivity (spreadsheets, word processing)—we compare the 2018 survey responses to previous surveys, identifying patterns. Finally, we look at the trends that are shaping current and future buying behavior. The analysis will interest IT decision-makers who would like to measure their “cloud journey” against other organizations as they wrestle with workload placement; as well as cloud and data center service providers and vendors who are looking to understand the pace of change.