Most IT decision makers expect to move majority of IT infrastructure to the cloud by 2017

The results indicate that most IT decision makers believe a balanced approach to infrastructure provision remains likely in the short term, despite nearly 30% of respondents predicting between 75-100% of their infrastructure to be in the cloud in two years.

Key survey findings include:

- 59% of respondents expect to have more than half their infrastructure in the cloud by 2017
- 40% expect to still largely provision IT through a non-cloud environment
- Nearly a third (29.7%) said they expect as much as 75-100% of their infrastructure to be in the cloud

“It’s clear that businesses intend to continue balancing multiple infrastructure environments over the coming years to retain the flexibility and control they need to meet their business needs,” explained Kevin Linsell, Director of Strategy and Architecture at Adapt. “Our flagship ‘Habitat’ approach to application hosting is a great example of how we as a service provider are supporting that requirement for agility, enabling businesses to blend cloud and non-cloud environments within the same managed service”.

Adapt argues that the cloud ‘hype cycle’ has come to an end, allowing businesses to take a step back and assess the true relevance of cloud to their on-going strategy, applications and workloads rather than simply participating in an ‘as a Service’ race. External pressures such as compliance and regulation may continue to inhibit take-up of cloud in sectors such as financial services, and the rapidly growing problem of cyber crime will force businesses to remain focused on the risks associated with both cloud and non-cloud approaches.