Australian enterprises look to hybrid Clouds

Australians enterprises lead the Asia Pacific in Cloud adoption, but most are choosing to go with a mix of public and private Cloud services, according to analyst firm Frost Sullivan. More than half of the enterprises that have adopted Cloud computing are using a hybrid model, according to Frost Sullivan’s State of Cloud Computing in Australia: 2011.

Forty three per cent of Australian enterprises are now using Cloud computing in some form, and 22 per cent of enterprises overall are using hybrid Clouds. Flexibility will help hybrid models maintain their dominance over the next year, Frost Sullivan predicts.

The report predicts that enterprises will continue to be cautious about shifting to the cloud. Those areas that will be shifted most rapidly include storage (for business continuity and disaster recovery), testing and development, and email.

All IT decision makers “will either maintain or increase their spending on cloud computing in the current fiscal year”, according to a Frost Sullivan statement. Frost Sullivan’s research director, Arun Chandrasekaran, said in a statement that a formal ‘Cloud first’ policy “does not yet exist in most enterprises”. “We expect to see a number of trial deployments this year as companies dip their toes in the water and test non-mission-critical applications and infrastructure.”

Forty one per cent of IT decision makers indicated that Cloud will be a top priority for the current fiscal year.

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