Hybrid cloud set for boom in growth – a tipping point in multinationals adoption?

In the connected world, the preferred technology solution for many is cloud computing. In this blog series we have previously commented on Forrester’s forecast that European companies will increase their budget for cloud computing technology post-2015. We also observed that European Commission has estimated cloud computing adoption in Europe to have an overall cumulative impact of £715bn on GDP and provide 3.8m jobs by 2020.

Against this background, recent research by MarketsandMarkets that shows hybrid cloud adoption set to rocket by 27% in the next four years, with a services value worth £57.5 billion by 2019 seems to be consistent with the likely trend. This feeling is augmented by the fact that months of fast growth has led MarketsandMarkets to re-forecast its previously predicted hybrid cloud market size of £40bn by 2019.

The research split the hybrid cloud marketplace into system and service, deployment model, vertical and region sectors and revealed the main adoption cases related to deployment server virtualisation, resource monitoring in real time and automating service provisioning.

From a sector based perspective, the research indicated that the banking, financial services and insurance markets will be the fastest adopters of hybrid cloud alongside other sectors. These include consumer goods and retail, healthcare, government, energy, education, telecommunication and IT-enabled services (ITES), manufacturing, research and consulting services, media and entertainment.

Our analysis

The research suggests that just under half (48%) of enterprises are planning to adopt hybrid cloud systems and services in the near future. Concerns relating to security and privacy have been the major stumbling block preventing organisations adopting hybrid cloud services thus far.

Until recently, much of cloud services adoption has been found primarily within the SME sector. While multi-national organisations contemplating their cloud strategies and investments have held fire on their plans until issues like cloud contracting process maturity, privacy and security concerns have been fully addressed. This research seems to indicate that we are perhaps seeing a tipping point in hybrid cloud services adoption by multi-national organisations … as well as the early adopters.

That may well be … however, CIOs of multinational companies are advised to continue to watch this space over the coming months while ongoing teething problems in the aforementioned areas like cloud contracting process maturity and security concerns are resolved!