Venyu Blog

Economists representing all levels of business and academia spend the better of their days sizing up world financial markets and prognosticating on the zigs and zags of the Euro when, in reality, they need only look skyward to the “Cloud” to figure out where those markets are really headed.

According to a report published by IDC that purports to be the first of its kind to examine the economics of cloud deployment, the combination of an improving economy and aging hardware has the IT market “ripe” for a move to Cloud-based infrastructure. In fact, IDC found that 44 percent of the enterprises it surveyed are considering a move to the Cloud, with projected server revenue for public Cloud computing growing from $7.3 billion in 2009 to $11.8 billion in 2014. In addition, IDC estimates that, for public clouds, 318,121 servers were deployed in 2009 and that figure will grow to 875,954 units in 2014.

In the minds of those surveyed when it comes to the pros and cons of “clouds,” public and private Clouds have almost total overlap. The top four reasons for moving to a both a private and public Cloud, according to those surveyed by IDC, are improved availability, aid in disaster recovery, improved asset utilization and lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and they were all of nearly equal value. Unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the list was saving on IT headcount.

One interesting factoid gleaned from IDC’s research is that early attempts at virtualization solved one problem but created another with physical server sprawl replaced by virtual machine server sprawl. As IDC research analyst Kate Broderick points out, “Companies were deploying virtual machines all over their environment and not removing them, so VMs used for a short-term project would still be up and running years later — a state that showed that virtualized environments were not yet fully mature.”

While it may indeed be a stretch to invest business migration to the Cloud as a genuine bellwether of an improving economy, it does suggest that unlike other highly touted but ultimately overhyped concepts, cloud storage is no longer a solution in search of a problem.