Let’s Budget for Cloud Computing
In today’s Directions Magazine, you may be seen the partial results of a poll in which we are asking our readers to "define" cloud computing. Of the 125 respondents so far, 19% said they don’t know what it is. They would be in good company. It seems that even IT managers are having difficulty with a definition but it is not stopping them from budgeting for and a procuring cloud services.
According to a report in InformationWeek, 66% of 250 IT managers interviewed by telephone said they are budgeting for cloud computing and that their budgets are likely to grow over the next two years.
According to the report:
- 82% of the respondents said they are "in some stage of trial, implementation or use of public clouds"
- 83% said the same for use of private clouds
- 75% said they see platform as a service (PaaS), such as when Salesforce.com offers database services and tools for customizing its applications or building new ones, as a form of cloud computing
- 60% said they see infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or Amazon’s EC2 as cloud computing
And, as we have surmised previously, the report also said that, "The main driver toward cloud computing is the efficiency that stems from using public clouds instead of further building out the IT infrastructure internally, according to 77% of respondents."
UPDATE: I came across this report on CIO.com entitle "Cloud Computing: What is its potential value to your company?" It was sponsored by Google and gives you some basic, "back of the envelope" idea of cost savings.
