Companies and organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud as a strategy for business growth, according to a study.
The Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by 451 Research LLC, said more than 52% of organizations identify the cloud as beneficial for either growing their business or realigning their organization to a new company strategy.
Along with this drive for growth comes significant opportunity for Microsoft hosting partners as customers look to grow their business with a hybrid cloud consumption model.
“The next two years will be the era of hybrid cloud, with 68% of customers planning to adopt hybrid cloud models — up from 49% today,” said Marco Limena, vice president, hosting service providers business at Microsoft. “In addition, the survey found that as customers begin to move their IT environments into the cloud, software is sticky and brand is even more important.”
In fact, the survey revealed that two-thirds of software-as-a-service customers use software online that they had previously installed on-premises. This highlights a significant opportunity for hosting service provider partners to offer customers Microsoft software they trust in a cloud environment.
Currently, 30 million x86 servers are operating worldwide, and approximately 22 million servers are running on the Windows platform and Windows-based applications. In addition, Microsoft Exchange has more than 78% share of insourced email in businesses larger than 25 seats across the US, Canada, France, Germany and the UK.