“Today, 12% of organizations surveyed run 100% of their IT in the cloud; in five years more than 50% of our respondents said they will be moving their IT entirely to the cloud; in 10 years, that number will climb past 70%.” – BetterCloud.com – Trends in Cloud IT: 2015
The chart above from a survey of over 1500 IT customers across the world says one thing: adoption of cloud has a long way to go. Which is really great for cloud service providers like us. David Politsis from BetterCloud.com delivered this breaking research at the Small Business Web Summit East in New York City, and one thing was certainly clear:
The business opportunity for cloud adoption is still very much ahead and by no means “over.”100% penetration of cloud into an organization means that the business is either “born in the cloud” or has completely transformed all their legacy, on-premise applications to the cloud. The laggard 20% in 2025 most likely are the Fortune 500 companies which may never fully go cloud for various reasons. Imagine a bank that has fully outsourced their IT to the cloud and has none of their own infrastructure — that’s pretty hard to imagine for 100+ year old banks, no?
Forecasting when such a deep adoption of cloud may reach a tipping point is really a crystal ball exercise. All indications point to a 5-10 year race ahead for businesses who buy IT services, for companies that make cloud software and services and companies that manage and help customers buy. This is a clarion call that we heard loud and clear, and we were very fortunate to get this first hand at the event. We look forward to attending year over year to this critical small business cloud event listening and participating in what the best in the business have to say about cloud adoption and the business of cloud.
About the author
Alex is a pioneer in using the cloud to meet the needs of small and medium sized business (SMBs) and membership-based organizations. He has a BSc in computer science from the University of Michigan and has worked as a product manager at two Internet startups. Alex is a father of 2 and plays the trumpet for fun. He is the founder and the president of the University of Michigan Alumni Club of Toronto.