The shift from cost savings to business growth is on for enterprise cloud computing.
Cloud deployments are reaching a tipping point, with companies expecting to have 60% of their total IT environments in a public, private, or hybrid cloud by 2018, up from 45% in 2016, according to IDG’s latest Cloud Computing Survey. To date, the main benefits of enterprise cloud solutions largely have been IT-centric business drivers. A 2016 survey by B2B research firm Clutch shows that nearly half of IT professionals (47%) at medium or large enterprises surveyed cited “increased efficiency” as the top benefit from using the cloud, followed by security (45%) and data storage (41%). In the IDG study, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) was the top driver of cloud investments.
