About 50% of organisations are expected to use software applications and data centre facilities from cloud service providers such as Google, Facebook and Amazon by 2017, according to a study from Gartner.
The analyst firm said that adoption of the ‘web-scale’ services would be driven by more open and efficient data centre facilities combined with server, storage and networking hardware at reduced costs.
Cameron Haight, research VP at Gartner, said: "Large cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google, Facebook are reinventing the way in which IT services can be delivered.
"Their capabilities go beyond scale in terms of sheer size to also include scale as it pertains to speed and agility. If organisations want to keep pace, then they need to emulate the architectures, processes and practices of these exemplary cloud providers."
Data centres are designed to reduce cost and waste, according to Haight, with ‘web-oriented architectures’ allowing developers to build systems that recover from breakdowns more quickly.
He said: "IT organisations have historically had a limited number of vendors from which to source their hardware, whether the need was for servers, storage devices or network equipment.
"This began to change when large cloud services providers, because of their extreme needs for scale and cost control, began to design and assemble infrastructure components.
"These devices were different than those sold to traditional organisations, because they did not have some of the basic features often available in commercial products."
