Most enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2018

More than four out of ten (41 percent) of all enterprise workloads all over the world are either on a private or public cloud. By the time we reach 2018, the number will have risen to 60 percent, according to a new report by 451 Research. The cloud-first approach is already common, the report says.

More than a third (38 per ent) of all enterprises polled for the report say they already have such a policy. Europe is leading the way, with 42 percent of organizations having such a policy. On-premise private clouds as well as software-as-a-service models are most common among enterprises, each accounting for 14 percent of all apps, 451 Research says.

But on-premise private clouds’ global adoption won’t see a significant rise over the next two years (from 13.8 to 14.2 percent). Europe will see the biggest growth -- from 15.6 to 16.8 percent. At the same time, SaaS will grow to 23 percent by mid-2018, growth which 451 Research calls "sharp". That is mostly because, at the moment, just six percent of enterprise workloads are running on IaaS.

"The predicted doubling of IaaS usage is the highest growth expectation for any type of cloud and points to significant revenue potential for vendors in this space", says Andrew Reichman, research director of 451 Research and lead author of Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation. "Because cloud delivers increasing agility and flexibility to better fit ever-changing business needs, IaaS and SaaS allow organizations to focus their efforts on their business, rather than on maintaining costly and complex datacenters and infrastructure. If used properly, it has the potential to dramatically improve efficiency and results of business technology usage".

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