52 percent of respondents say their CIO or CTO is a primary decision-maker in the evaluation of hosting and cloud services, followed closely by the CEO, who is a primary decision-maker for 44 percent of companies surveyed.
Nearly 70 percent of the opportunity for cloud service providers now centers on application hosting (email and business applications), managed services (backup and disaster recovery), and security services (threat management), said Microsoft Corp.-commissioned study conducted by 451 Research.
“More than 75 percent of customers are now beyond the cloud discovery phase and expect that in three years, almost half of their applications will be deployed in a combination of private and public cloud environments,” said Aziz Benmalek, general manager, Hosting Service Provider business, Microsoft.
Of the 73 percent of respondents with a formal Windows Server 2003 migration plan, nearly half will increase their use of hosting and cloud service providers as a result. Almost 50 percent also expect that they will deploy a newer version of Windows Server in multiple on-premises and off-premises hybrid cloud environments.
Cloud service providers can tap into infrastructure solutions such as Windows Server, Microsoft System Center, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure, as well as applications such as Exchange Online, SharePoint, Lync, Office and Office 365.
Microsoft has added 5,000 new hosting service providers in the past 12 months and has the largest hosting community of any vendor.
The study called Beyond Infrastructure: Cloud 2.0 Signifies New Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers surveyed nearly 1,700 hosting and cloud customers across 10 countries from December 2014 through March 2015. Countries covered in the study span mature and emerging markets, including Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S.
editor@infotechlead.com
