Public cloud services simultaneously cannibalising, stimulating demand

Public cloud services are simultaneously cannibalising and stimulating demand for external IT services spending. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) adoption - the most basic and fundamental form of cloud computing service - has expanded beyond development and test use cases, according to a study by research and advisory firm Gartner.

"Public cloud adoption is accelerating and public cloud services do, and will, cannibalise IT services spending in the coming years, most notably in the data centre,'' said Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner. ''At the same time, public cloud adoption offers service providers the opportunity to accelerate externalisation of spending for the non-public cloud workloads and IT operations and service management responsibilities in tandem with clients pursuing a public cloud initiative''.

A recent Gartner survey found that 19 per cent of organisations are using cloud computing for most of production computing, and 20 per cent of organisations are using storage as a service for all, or most, storage requirements.

Gartner surveyed 556 organisations from June 2012 through July 2012, across nine countries and multiple industries where cloud planning is a critical issue.

The survey found that public cloud adoption varies by service. Infrastructure as a service is moving from lower-risk pilot programs and into production environments. Organisations' stated plans to adopt IaaS in the near future reinforce the importance of IaaS in an overall portfolio of infrastructure service offerings.

Similarly, Platform as a service (PaaS) adoption clearly indicates the growing strategic importance of public cloud services for organisations that are adopting cloud infrastructure to support their business needs. Current and anticipated adoption rates of PaaS are leading indicators of a more substantive move to cloud environments and represent an opportunity for service providers to deliver PaaS-oriented solutions to help their clients make this move.