Enterprises are now using the cloud for functions business-critical applications, and this could hint at higher demand for enterprise-grade availability and security for cloud services.
According to the first annual "State of the Enterprise Cloud" report by Verizon, which drew upon Verizon data from January 2012 to June 2013, external-facing and critical business applications now account for 60% of cloud usage. Back-office applications such as manufacturing and resource planning software applications, which have high storage requirements and constantly changing usage patterns, account for 23% of all cloud use.
The report, which examines how organizations are deploying cloud technologies and what they want from cloud service providers, also found that the use of cloud-based storage increased by 90% over the period studied. Cloud-based memory usage by organizations had also increased - by 100%.
According to the report, this increase in cloud-based storage and cloud-based memory directly relates to enterprises' increasing shift of business-critical applications to the cloud. Another trend noted by the report concerned enterprises' move toward gaining cloud efficiency - demand for cloud-based storage and cloud-based memory greatly outpaced that of VMs, whose number deployed grew by just 35% during the period studied.
The growing number of VMs indicates that enterprises are now moving more workloads to the cloud, says the report, who found that a successfully deployed cloud application would tend to lead to other applications being moved onto the cloud as well. According to the report, enterprises who adopted the cloud early have significantly increased their investments over time, with customers increasing their monthly cloud spend by 45% from July 2012 to July 2013.