Remarkable Results From Cloud Delivery Study
Today, IT executives are at a crossroads when it comes to developing greater capabilities for information management and governance operations for their organizations. While they find that they need greater resources to keep up with the sheer amount of data being produced by, and housed in their organizations, they also need more efficient systems. Increasingly, their data center capabilities are under pressure from customers, business lines and regulators.
In the past, the strategy for many organizations looking to build out capabilities was to invest in on-premises infrastructure, such as servers, networking equipment and storage. Understandably, the executives managing these capabilities have wanted to keep this infrastructure on-premises – for greater control and/or security. However, IT executives, even those working in organizations managing over 25 petabyes of information, may be surprised to learn that cloud-delivered services have been shown to be more cost effective, reliable and have dramatically fewer outages or breaches than on-premises systems.
Recently, IDC conducted a study* to look the differences between information management services offered through on-premises solutions and cloud-delivered solutions. The findings of the study include:
- Potential 36% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) when using solutions delivered as a dedicated private cloud.
- Cloud solutions are more reliable, experiencing 76% fewer incidents of unplanned outages compared to on-premises systems.
- Cloud solutions resulted in shorter response time when problems arose; the study showed that cloud-managed solutions took half the time to respond to incidents.
- Organizations that have adopted cloud solutions experience enhanced business agility, able to launch new services and applications 52% faster.
These results provide overwhelming evidence that cloud-delivery is an excellent option. However, we know that within the organization, IT executives need to develop a strategy and make the case to make this kind of change. A good strategic approach to a possible shift to cloud services should include gaining metrics on physical elements of the data center (including storage and information management) so that real comparisons can be made. This data, combined with a good comparison of the effectiveness of cloud-delivered services, can help executives develop an effective roadmap for moving forward.
*Source: IDC White Paper sponsored by Viewpointe, Cloud Economics: A Financial Analysis of Information Management IT Delivery Models, IDC #243928, Oct 2013.