In terms of security, uptime, and value, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is preferred by organizations to rivals Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
This is one of the key takeaways from a Spiceworks report titled “Public Cloud Trends 2019 and Beyond”. It also revealed that respondents preferred Azure for compatibility, while GCP was deemed the easiest to manage and most innovative. However, respondents gave each provider close rankings.
According to 72 percent of respondents, service uptime was the most important factor in ranking cloud services providers. Security (53%) and service compatibility (46%) were also important factors.
The Austin-based marketing company, Marketing Services, found that organizations could almost double their use of public clouds services in the next two year. According to the study, only 27 percent of business workloads use public cloud services at present, but that number will rise to 48 percent by 2021.
Small businesses, defined as those with less than 99 employees, had higher cloud use expectations. According to the report, 53% of small businesses expect to use public clouds for their workloads. This compares to 46% for mid-sized business workloads and 41% for enterprise workloads (organizations with more than 1,000 employees).
Spiceworks was told by survey respondents that Web sites (55%), and e-mail (54%) were the most likely workloads to be run in the cloud. Database servers (59%) and identity management solutions (57%) were the most likely to be kept on-premises.
Spiceworks cites its earlier “Spiceworks 2019 STATE OF IT BUDGETS” study to show that the new technologies that attracted interest in cloud computing included serverless computing (15 percent), edge computing (15 percent), and containers (18 percent).
Some organizations still find security associated with public cloud usage a hurdle. Only 35% of respondents believed that cloud service providers provided better security than the IT professionals currently provide for their servers. Nearly a third (30%) of respondents said they have experienced a cloud-based security problem. Enterprise respondents reported a higher percentage (nearly 50%).
Respondents considered it difficult to move away from cloud services. According to the report (p.9), “more than half (54%)” of IT decision-makers believe it would be difficult for some of their organization’s workloads to be moved to another public cloud provider.
According to the survey, respondents would be most likely to leave a cloud service provider if they experience unreliable service (87%) or significant price increases (81%) or ongoing latency problems (73%)
In April, Spiceworks surveyed 452 IT decision-makers. Respondents were from the United States (74%) and Europe (26%), and represented small, medium, and large enterprises. Spiceworks also offers software and community discussion forums for IT professionals.
