The majority of enterprises in the U.S. plan to increase their spending on cloud computing by as much as 50 percent in 2016, according to a study conducted by Clutch, a B2B research firm.
At the same time, nearly 30 percent will maintain their current spending, and only 6 percent will reduce their cloud computing budget.
Clutch said this spending pattern indicates a growth opportunity for cloud service providers in the enterprise market.
Clutch surveyed 300 IT professionals who work at medium and large enterprises using a full-service cloud computing platform and found that 47 percent identified increased efficiency as the main benefit of cloud computing.
Further, analysts confirm that the value enterprises derive from cloud infrastructure directly influences spending patterns.
“Spending on the Cloud has increased because companies realize they are getting a lot of value,” said Jason Reichl, CEO of Go Nimbly. “The Cloud is building ROI faster and with better business accuracy, so companies are willing to reinvest in it every year.”
The highest priority cited for enterprise cloud usage is file storage, at 70 percent, followed by backup and disaster recovery at 62 percent, application deployment at 51 percent, and application development and testing at 46 percent.
The survey suggests that cloud service providers can appeal to enterprises by leveraging features that correspond to these prioritized tasks.
“The ROI of file storage on the Cloud is pretty straight-forward. Every company needs file storage,” said Duane Tharp, vice president of technical sales and services at Cloud-Elements.
“The ease of adopting the Cloud for file storage needs enables rapid adoption in this space as opposed to other use cases for the Cloud.”
