Public cloud adoption stalling in US

Adoption of internal cloud technologies have increased by 50 percent in a year while public cloud usage seems to have stalled, according to the most recent survey of The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) members.

The ODCA is a global organisation that was formed in 2010 to promote the adoption of interoperable, non-proprietary cloud technologies. This was its third annual survey investigating adoption of its members’ cloud computing and data analytics technologies.

The survey found that in the past 12 months, the number of respondents already running more than 40 percent of their workloads in internal clouds had increased from 20 percent to 31 percent. This figure is expected to grow as high as 70 percent by 2016.

For the first time in its annual survey, the ODCA measured the adoption of virtual private and community cloud. It discovered that just over half of respondents were using these technologies for at least a fifth -- 20 percent -- of their operations.

However, adoption of public cloud technologies seemed to have stalled. The survey revealed that since the previous year, adoption of public cloud has remained flat.

It attributed the result to organisations concentrating on building their internal and community clouds, but said it was also influenced by the challenges and barriers that still remain in using public clouds.

One major challenge faced by users of any type of cloud is modifying or redesigning applications to better make use of cloud technologies.

The ODCA indicated a prime focus for it in 2014 will be to address the need to improve the resilliency of applications in a cloud environment - more than 75 percent of ODCA members named this as a priority.

Security remains the top concern for ODCA members when adopting cloud services.

Although 67 percent identified security as a limiting factor in the adoption of cloud services, that figure has actually decreased by 13 percent since the last survey. The number of members concerned about the reliability of cloud service offerings also fell by 8 percent to 36 percent.

Regulatory issues were flagged by 56 percent of respondents as a barrier while vendor lock-in was a concern for 46 percent of respondents.