Cloud

The Next Wave of Cloud Adoption Is Coming

There’s plenty of room for growth in the cloud, and the second wave of adopters won’t necessarily come from the cool-kid startup crowd.

Ricky Ribeiro

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Ricky publishes and manages the content on BizTech magazine's website. He's a writer, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all-around digital guy.

While cloud computing might seem old hat to many people, we’re still very much in the early days of the cloud era.

According to CDW’s 2013 State of the Cloud report, 39 percent of organizations are implementing or maintaining a cloud solution, which means there’s still plenty of room left before we can say we’ve reached cloud saturation in business IT.

But a new survey from Gigaom Research says that before we even approach that level of cloud pervasiveness, the second wave of cloud adoption is already upon us. And here’s the twist: It won’t be driven by cutting-edge startups; it’ll be the enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses realizing and deciding that the cloud can help them reinvent their businesses.

Here’s how David Card from Gigaom summed up the main motivations for this growing interest in cloud adoption:

Over 40 percent of leading-edge tech buyers say creating new businesses and revenue streams are among their near-term strategic objectives for using cloud-based applications and services. Another 35 percent want to — or already do — run their company off the cloud. While the mainstream is still migrating necessary but non-revenue-generating IT functions to the cloud, nearly 30 percent are also looking at new business. We expect that attitude will increase over time.

Even more interestingly, while the cutting-edge startups may no longer be the biggest growth sector in cloud computing, the adoption of the most cutting-edge tech in cloud, such as software-defined networking, is quickly gaining traction. According to the survey results, organizations “expect to nearly double their usage of software-defined networking (SDN) in two years, to a nearly 30 percent adoption rate.”

SDN is still in its early days for many small businesses, as recent survey data from other reports has shown, but if Gigaom’s predictions hold true, it could quickly become the new normal among businesses of all sizes.

To learn more about how cloud computing solutions can help your organization get ahead, visit cdw.com/cloud.

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