Gartner: Only 38% of Organizations Use Cloud?

A report by IT research firm Gartner, Inc.  found that only 38 percent of all organizations surveyed in the report use cloud services today. But we wonder: Does the report reflect the fact that many employees use cloud services — Dropbox, Box, Google Apps and more — on their own and without corporate approval at work?

Regardless, cloud use continues to rise. According to the report, 80 percent of organizations said that they intend to use cloud services in some form within 12 months, including 55 percent of the organizations not doing so today.

Gartner Research Director Gregor Petric said in his prepared remarks that the channel should not base future cloud usage on current numbers.

“Cloud computing is set to have a considerable impact on business in the future which is reflected in the survey finding that around 60 percent of organizations plan increased investment over the next two years to five years, while only 6 percent plan to decrease investments in cloud services,” he said.

Gartner pointed to three determing factors of enterprise cloud usage in the near to midterm future: increased cloud usage will be through tactical business solutions, business impact of cloud services increases as they continue to move up the cloud services value chain and introduction of cloud solutions will lead to a more diverse solution portfolio with widely varying implementation and migration timelines.

Surprisingly, Gartner said highly critical applications may be the first to be moved to cloud computing environments, if applications are broadly used. Will the move to the cloud, however, be slowed down by recent NSA PRISM revelations? Only time will tell.