Cloud a hit with Aussie companies: Analyst

Australian enterprises are moving quickly towards the deployment of cloud services and are among the fastest adopters in the Asia Pacific, according to a report released by analyst group Frost and Sullivan.

The report, State of Cloud Computing in Australia: 2011 found that 43 percent of Australian enterprises are using some sort of cloud computing with 41 percent of IT decision makers affirming that cloud computing would be a key priority for them in the current fiscal year.

“There has been a significant increase in the use of cloud services in Australia in the past 12 months and all the indications are that this will continue,” said Frost and Sullivan ICT research director Arun Chandrasekaran.

“While a formal 'cloud first' policy does not exist yet in most enterprises, the idea of a 'cloud alternative' evaluation is increasingly common”.

This contrasted with a report out of the US which showed that governments of all levels and Universities remain leery of cloud services, especially those delivered via public clouds. 

Frost's Chandrasekaran said a number of Australian companies were expected this year to undertake trial deployments of cloud services to test non-mission critical applications and infrastructure.

Businesses surveyed by Frost cited the main drivers for adoption of cloud computing as savings on capital and operational expenditure, improved business agility and the ability to immediately access IT resources.

The study identified three distinct cloud deployment models; public cloud; private cloud; and hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud was the most popular model, deployed by 22 percent of Australian enterprises and more than half of those already using cloud services.

Software-as-a-service was the most popular cloud offering, with 70 percent of companies indicating that they were renting software through the cloud.

Infrastructure-as-a-service, which provides companies with computing and storage on-demand, saw rapid growth over the last year with close to 50 percent of cloud users accessing resources in this manner, while platform-as-a-service is yet to fully take off.

Frost and Sullivan identified the top nine players in the Australian cloud market as Microsoft, Google, IBM, VMware, Amazon, HP, Cisco, Rackspace and Telstra.