White Paper

IDC - The Journey to the Cloud - October 2011

In its latest dedicated survey, carried out in 2011, IDC showed that a large proportion of companies adopted or are planning to adopt Cloud as a delivery model for parts of their IT. Of the 701 IT managers were interviewed within organisations across Europe and 79% of the respondents stated they are thinking about deploying a Cloud model or have already done so. Of these, 40% have at least one service based on (private or public) Cloud or are in trial phase.

Clouds are now a reality and the leading questions today are clearly no longer about viability or whether Clouds are just a marketing gizmo, but about the timing of the transition and how it should be done for maximum efficiency. In other words, companies are now turning the spotlight on to operational practicalities:

• Which Cloud model best fits our legal, economic, organisational and IT environments?
• What contractual precautions should my company take? How should reversibility be planned?
• Which applications are suitable for a Cloud model? How do I manage my specific environments?
• What service levels can be expected, in terms of uptime and data protection, security and integrity, etc.? Does my service provider have the answers?
• What will be the impact of such a transition on my licence contracts?
• Does the systems management software have to be the same for Cloud and non-Cloud environments?
• Beyond virtualization, orchestration, and self-service management do we have to invest in technologies for capacity planning, performance management and real-time resource optimisation?

This IDC executive brief presents an overview of the Cloud's market maturity and, through case studies, discusses the issues and impacts of a private Cloud initiative, before finally putting forward a series of recommendations for a Cloud roadmap.

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