Cloud service companies

As the demand for cloud services continues to grow — the global market is expected to exceed $79 billion by 2018 — the need for cloud services brokers is likely to increase. Cloud services brokers offer end-to-end cloud service solutions to companies and government IT departments to meet their needs.

Government has increasingly adopted cloud services and the cloud model for IT services with a view to cutting its data center infrastructure expenditure by almost a third (30%). Similarly in business, the use of cloud services can also have cost-saving implications. In addition, almost 60% of large enterprise-level companies are opting for solutions offered by cloud services brokerages with a view to addressing integration between development and operations. The same percentage (59%) use cloud communications to seamlessly share information across applications.

The divide on public versus private cloud solutions remains with almost equal percentages (57% and 60%) choosing private and public cloud services respectively; just 19% use hybrid offerings. This picture may change in the near future with the International Data Corporation (IDC) predicting that public cloud spending will surpass $100 billion in 2016 and with 48% of respondents in a separate study aimed at enterprise executives indicating plans to adopt hybrid offerings soon. Cloud brokerage services can offer advice on the best option — public, private or hybrid — for the particular business and its needs. In all, across all types of cloud offerings, over 35% of current IT services use or partially is cloud for delivery of services.

The move to could has necessitated additional training for staff, with 49% of those surveyed indicating that they offer some form of IT security training or training investments for cloud for their employees. For most corporate cloud users (43%), reliability is the most important measure for cloud services brokers, followed by cost (28%) and ability to integrate with existing infrastructure (27%). Cloud will continue to be a key driver for business in 2016 and more businesses are likely to invest in such solutions going forward.