Research commissioned by Microsoft has found that more than 52% of organisations believe that the cloud adoption will help in their business growth, with 68% turning to hybrid cloud consumption model in the next two years.
The study, the New Era of Hosted Services, was conducted by 451 Research and includes responses from more than 1,500 customers across small, midsize and large organisations in 10 countries across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.
Microsoft vice president of hosting service providers business Marco Limena said the next two years will be the era of hybrid cloud, with 68% of customers planning to adopt hybrid cloud models, up from 49% today.
"In addition, the survey found that as customers begin to move their IT environments into the cloud, software is sticky and brand is even more important," Limena said.
The survey found that two-thirds of software-as-a-service customers use software online that they had previously installed on-premises, which highlights a significant opportunity for hosting service provider partners to provide customers Microsoft software they trust in a cloud environment.
At present, 30 million x86 servers are operating globally, and about 22 million servers are running on the Windows platform and Windows-based applications.
Microsoft Exchange has more than 78% share of insourced email in businesses larger than 25 seats across the US, Canada, France, Germany and the UK.
451 Research VP of data centre initiatives and digital infrastructure Michelle Bailey said IT professionals were very clear in their response to this survey, cloud-based computing will play an important and growing role as part of their IT portfolios moving forward.
"The study clearly shows a strong customer preference for full-service hosting solutions over the next two years, with substantial investment increases in security services, database, shared servers, backup and recovery, and managed hosted desktop," Bailey said.
"As this market matures, customers are selecting hosting providers based on trust and their ability to grow with customers’ future businesses."
Microsoft said it will help customers with the transition to the cloud and has built a large portfolio of products to support it, including infrastructure applications such as Windows Server, Microsoft System Center, Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Azure, as well as applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Office and Office 365.
