Frost & Sullivan (F&S) says 70 percent of these Australian organisations will increase their cloud-based solutions budget significantly over the next 12 months. In general, larger organisations spend much more on cloud computing than smaller ones.
“Business agility, increased standardisation of IT infrastructure and the ability to lower overall IT costs are driving the adoption of cloud computing amongst enterprises in Australia,” says F&S.
“Security, reliability of services and hosting capabilities in Australia are top criteria for selecting cloud providers.”
An intrinsic part of this is the ability of cloud computing to lower upfront IT capital expenditure and grow the business without the expenses of installing new systems.
According to F&S, most Australian organisations are now fully cloud deployed rather than in pilot phase. HR management and unified communications are the two slowest applications to move out of pilot phase. Storage and computing solutions has the highest rate of full deployment.
Phil Harpur, senior research manager with F&S’s ANZ ICT practice, says email and storage, and computing resources are the most commonly accessed solutions via the cloud.
“Others commonly accessed via the cloud are office productivity applications, and web and email security.”
Companies report that security is the most important issue when selecting cloud vendor.
They also take into account reliability of services/support, availability of local hosting capabilities, company reputation, value-added services, price and ROI.
