From Tactic to Strategy:
The 2011 Cloud Computing Tracking Poll
CDW's first Cloud Computing Tracking Poll surveyed 1,200 IT professionals in U.S. organizations* to determine:
- Where organizations are with cloud adoption
- What benefits are driving adoption
- What challenges still hinder progress
- Recommendations for how organizations can successfully implement cloud computing
In the survey, we defined cloud computing as a "model for enabling convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned."
Throughout the report, we refer to "cloud users" as those organizations that identified themselves as implementing or maintaining cloud computing.
*Small, medium and large businesses; Federal, state and local government agencies; healthcare organizations; and K-12 and higher education institutions
Click to Tweet: #CDW report finds 73 percent of cloud-using organizations started with just one application http://bit.ly/jMKbWn
- 38 percent have a written strategic plan for the adoption of cloud computing
*Implementing or maintaining
- Large businesses and higher education institutions lead on cloud adoption
Cloud Benefits Align with Organizational Goals
- Cloud computing is helping organizations make progress toward key goals
Organizations Step into the Cloud
- Cloud users most often begin with a single cloud application. Most also share key characteristics
Applications most commonly operated in the cloud are commodity applications such as email (50 percent of cloud users), file storage (39 percent), web and video conferencing (36 and 32 percent, respectively), and online learning (34 percent).
- Develop your vision
- Understand where your leadership wants to take your organization
- Build an IT strategy and gain executive sponsorship
- Commit to a timeline
- Assess your IT assets
- Get control of IT costs and conduct full data center assessments
- Evaluate IT skills and disaster readiness
- Embrace IT governance
- Invest in validated architecture
- Develop enterprise architecture
- Establish capacity planning discipline
- Evaluate IT skills and disaster readiness
- Virtualize everything
CDW hired O'Keeffe & Company to conduct an online survey of 1,200 IT decision makers in March 2011. The sample size results in a margin of error of ±2.7% at a 95% confidence level. The margin of error for industry sub-groups is ±8.0% at a 95% confidence level
| Small Business (20 - 99 employees) |
Medium Business (100 - 499 employees) |
Large Business (500+ employees) |
Federal Government | |||||||||||||
| N = 150 | N = 150 | N = 150 | N = 150 | |||||||||||||
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| State/Local Government | Healthcare | Higher Education | K-12 Public School Districts | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| N = 150 | N = 150 | N = 150 | N = 150 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Respondent Demographics:
| IT Decision Makers | Titles | Organization Size | ||||||||||||||||||||
| 100% of respondents are familiar with their organization's use of, or plans for, cloud computing |
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