Cloud Hosting

Hosting and cloud-services spending among enterprises is growing, both in dollar-value terms and as a portion of overall IT spending, across nearly all sectors in terms of company size, geography and vertical market.

Thats according to 451 Researchs latest Voice of the Enterprise: Hosting and Cloud Managed Services, Budgets and Outlook study. Based on research conducted in January and February with about 1,000 IT professionals around the world, the quarterly study combines 451s analysis with survey responses and interviews from a panel of more than 60,000 senior IT buyers and enterprise technology executives.

Liam Eagle, 451s research manager of hosting and cloud services, tells Channel Partners the trend will lead to new opportunities for the channel.

As part of that transformation, hosting and cloud services spending is trending toward infrastructure and application services packaged with value-added managed services and security services," he said. We believe that is where a lot of the opportunity for the IT channel will lie in the future supporting the consumption of hosted infrastructure and applications by enterprises that may require assistance with the operational management or security of those resources, including being a complimentary third party to the infrastructure or application subscription."

Enterprises this year expect growth in their hosting and cloud services spending to outpace growth in overall IT spending by 25.8 percent to 12 percent. Among large businesses (1,000-9,999 employees), an average of 33.3 percent growth is expected in hosting and cloud services spending.

Among respondents, 88 percent expect to increase their hosting and cloud services budgets in 2017 versus 2016, compared to 70 percent that expect to increase total IT budgets year over year.

Just 9.5 percent expect a decrease in hosting and cloud services spending, compared to 22.3 percent that expect a decrease in total IT spending, according to the study.

The increased spending is being driven by: migration of workloads from on-premises environments to the cloud; adding new resource capacity due to business growth; new IT initiatives; and businesses buying additional services they previously did not have. These drivers vary significantly by company size, with small businesses strongly emphasizing new capacity due to growth, and medium and very large businesses primarily focused on migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud.

Public cloud and SaaS providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are being adopted by the largest portion of respondents, according to the study. However, about 50 percent of respondents indicate they are ...

Excerpt from:
Hosting, Cloud Services to Lead Total Enterprise IT Spending Growth - Channel Partners