Infonetics Research on Saturday said among its North American enterprise survey respondents, the top drivers for cloud adoption are performance, agility, scalability, and cost reduction.
Enterprises’ mix of cloud services is changing: Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud-as-a-service (CaaS) have the largest increases in adoption between 2013 and 2015.
Just over half of respondents believe that shifting to the cloud will make it necessary to consider alternate network vendors.
83 percent of enterprises surveyed rate service and support a very important criterion for choosing a cloud service provider, followed closely by experience and pricing structure.
Cloud adoption is impacting enterprise IT investments, with not only the WAN-but also the LAN-high on the list for upgrades.
“Hybrid cloud is the next evolution in cloud architecture, with adoption among enterprises expected to more than double by 2015,” said Cliff Grossner, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research.
Infonetics Research noted that the transformation to the cloud is spelling disruption and opportunity for network equipment vendors.
The report said network equipment vendors would be wise to demonstrate how their offerings can be part of a hybrid cloud environment where interoperability between network management, server virtualization, and data center orchestration platforms are critical factors for success.