Which apps are driving increased demand for cloud storage, memory?
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Cloud-based storage usage has increased 90 percent and memory by 100 percent among organizations using Verizon Terremark cloud service, according to a new company report.
The shift of mission-critical applications to the cloud is driving increased demand for cloud-based storage and memory among private- and public-sector organizations using Verizon Terremark’s cloud services, according to a new report released by the company.
Cloud-based storage use has increased by 90 percent and memory by 100 percent since January 2012, according to the report, which draws upon Verizon data collected between January 2012 and June 2013 from cloud users in finance and banking, health care, government and technology.
The 2013 State of the Enterprise Cloud report examines current cloud adoption and usage trends both in terms of how organizations are deploying cloud technologies and what they want from enterprise cloud services, Verizon officials said.
As organizations move more compute-intensive workloads to the cloud, enterprises are becoming adept at optimizing cloud resources, the report states. Increased cloud efficiencies means that the number of virtual machines deployed is growing more slowly than memory and storage requirements—35 percent over the same period, indicating that organizations are getting more from each VM. Although organizations frequently deploy and tear down virtual machines according to business needs, the overall trend is consistently upward, according to the report.
Organizations can deploy the equivalent of three to four physical servers to one virtual machines and gain up to three times more performance than in the past. Many also are writing their own application programming interfaces to start and stop servers in the cloud. “This growing skill at managing cloud-based workloads makes it possible to deploy more applications, requiring more memory and storage requirements, without needing to deploy VMs in an equal ratio,” the report states.
Once enterprises successfully deploy an application as a cloud-based service, they tend to move others to the cloud as well. Enterprises that adopted cloud computing early have significantly increased investments over time. From July 2012 to June 2013, users of Verizon Terremark’s cloud services have increased their monthly spending by 45 percent, according to the report.
What applications are being moved to the cloud? Sixty percent of cloud applications are Web-based and Internet-facing. “These applications are particularly suited to a cloud environment because they require proximity to the backbone of the Internet and are cost-effective when managed through the cloud instead of a physical infrastructure deployment.” This is probably why e-commerce and e-mail were the earliest applications to become cloud-enabled.
As cloud security and reliability has improved, enterprises have begun deploying back-office applications such as manufacturing and resource planning software, which have high storage requirements and constantly changing usage patterns, making them ideal for the cloud. These back-office applications need enterprise-grade cloud services with high levels of availability, security, and industry specific requirements; they
Many enterprises are still in the first phase of cloud adoption—moving low-priority and commodity services to the cloud. Forward-thinking organizations are looking for closer integration of cloud services with their own infrastructures and applications by leveraging a hybrid model to create differentiation and competitive advantage, according to the report. Security and related compliance requirements are driving hybrid cloud growth in the enterprise and public sector, which will require users to maintain an increased focus on their cloud provider’s data center. Growth in big data will drive cloud adoption as a result of the increasing demands and volumes associated with data management and analysis, the report states.