Business Technology Roundtable

Digital  Business Transformation projects gained momentum in 2014, as more companies moved their legacy IT workloads to cloud computing platforms and launched a variety of new cloud-native applications. This pervasive trend will continue and accelerate for the duration of 2015. Total cloud IT infrastructure investment (server, storage systems , and ethernet switch) is forecast to grow by 21 percent year-over-year to reach $32 billion in 2015 -- accounting for about 33 percent of all IT infrastructure spending this year, which will be up from about 28 percent in 2014. Private cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 16 percent year-over-year to $12 billion, while public cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow by 25 percent in 2015 to $21 billion, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). For the full year 2014, cloud IT infrastructure spending totaled $26.4 billion, up 18.7 percent year over year from $22.3 billion -- priva...

As this year comes to a close, let's take one last look at the most pervasive cloud computing trends -- including increased usage across the different cloud service models, the key business drivers and the impact of agile innovation strategies. Cloud computing adoption has matured, with 69 percent of survey respondents stating that at least a portion of their computing infrastructure is in the cloud. However, 56 percent of companies are still identifying IT operations that could potentially move to the cloud , according to the latest market study by IDG Enterprise. Survey respondents believe that business technology is a game changer, and cloud solutions are providing advantages from increasing IT agility (63 percent), IT innovation (61 percent) and improving the ability to access critical business data and digital service applications (58 percent). Removing the Barriers to Cloud Adoption That said, IT leaders perspective on barriers to bringing these advantages to fruition...