McKinsey Sees Enterprise IT Strategies Shifting from Build to Buy

The debate over cloud within the enterprise community is over, and has been for some time now. It’s no longer a question of if but of how to utilize it. Increasingly, IT leaders representing companies from the regional small business to the global enterprise are grappling with the ins and outs of cloud, and how best to employ it.

Recently, McKinsey performed its IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) Cloud and Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure surveys, wherein researchers interviewed around 800 CIOs and IT executives about their rate of cloud adoption and projections for its future use. Respondent companies ranged in size from small businesses to Fortune 100 enterprises and represent a wide variety of geographies and industries.

Below are some of the key points from the research:

Adoption will continue full steam ahead. Across the board, enterprises will continue to reduce the number of workloads in on-premise traditional and virtualized environments and increase the number of workloads in the cloud. The larger enterprises will also pick up their rate of adoption, as they have generally been lower than smaller enterprises in cloud adoption thus far.

Cloud service providers will be the primary buyers of servers and supporting infrastructure over the next few years. So while enterprises are looking to send more of their workloads to the cloud all the time, they’re seeing cloud storage as something that makes more sense to rent than build. The purchasing, maintenance, and eventual upgrade of these infrastructures is something best left to the cloud providers, not the end users.

There is a lot of room to grow. Even with the number of companies who are already serious about migrating their digital assets to the cloud, cloud adoption as measured by the number of x86 workloads in the cloud still sits at less than 20% overall. Large enterprises are expected to significantly increase their adoption of private cloud services and are expected to nearly double workloads in the private cloud by 2018.

Researchers found out that enterprises also typically lean towards “hyperscale” providers— companies that have lots of capacity and flexibility. Enterprises have already displayed a clear preference for working with these types of companies (AWS, Google, Microsoft) that can handle capacity, scale, and that can make interconnection and add-on services a breeze as needed.

Security and compliance remain top concerns for enterprise customers. That’s why Digital Realty makes security and compliance among our very highest concerns. The array of physical and digital tools we use means your data is protected by a veritable fortress, around the clock.

Are you doing your research on potential cloud service providers for your organization? We invite you to learn more about Digital Realty’s comprehensive cloud solution, The Connected Campus, as well as Digital Realty’s newest solution, Service Exchange, which will be available November 2016.