Cost savings, disaster recovery continue to drive cloud adoption

PITTSBURGH, USA: Avere Systems, the leading provider of enterprise storage for cloud enabled data centers, released the findings of an original cloud adoption study conducted at AWS re:Invent 2013.

The overwhelming majority of attendees surveyed indicated that they currently or plan to use cloud for compute, storage, or application purposes within the next two to five years. Cost savings and disaster recovery were found to be the factors most heavily driving cloud storage adoption, indicating that organizations believe cloud storage has the potential to increase efficiency, productivity, and the bottom line for their business.

Despite the majority of participants reporting cloud use within the next few years, attendees surveyed indicated security, performance, and organizational resistance as the largest barriers to cloud adoption. In addition, more than a third of attendees surveyed reported that their primary providers of traditional on-premises storage equipment are not helping with their adoption of cloud storage.

"Avere has prided itself with consistently bringing solutions to market that allow customers to leverage a variety of storage - including cloud - without sacrificing performance, availability or security of data," said Rebecca Thompson, vice president of marketing, Avere Systems.

"However, there are still people and process challenges that impede cloud adoption, as legacy storage vendors - with no suitable solutions - have driven fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of customers. It's incumbent upon emerging market leaders like Avere and our ecosystem of partners to educate end-users on the myths and fallacies of cloud use and streamline the transition so companies are able to fully see the capital and operational benefits of this new shift in storage and compute."

Key findings

Cloud Adoption - More than 90 percent of attendees surveyed currently or plan to use cloud for compute, storage or application purposes within the next two to five years.

Barriers to Cloud Use - 60 percent of attendees indicated that security concerns remained among the top barriers to cloud adoption, while organizational resistance and performance issues were also identified as top barriers as identified by 53 and 29 percent of respondents, respectively.

Benefits of Cloud Storage - 60 percent of those surveyed viewed the main benefits of cloud storage to be cost savings and disaster recovery/business continuity.

Concerns about Cloud Storage - Even after overcoming barriers to cloud adoption, almost half of attendees surveyed indicated that performance is a critical component of cloud storage, as 38 percent of respondents said they require better performance from their cloud storage solutions.