Bet on the Cloud That's Right for You
By Christine Cignoli

This week's news brings us further reminders that if you're betting on cloud, you're headed in the right direction. The cloud is growing seven times faster than the rest of IT, according to IDC, with a 25% spending increase just from 2016 to 2017. SaaS still leads the pack, with an estimated two-thirds of public cloud spending going that way. Large enterprises, with more than 1,000 employees, are predicted to account for more than half of cloud spending and have the fastest annual growth rate.

One caveat, though, is that your cloud deployment should be tailored for your business. Cloud isn't one-size-fits-all, and charging ahead with a cloud-first approach won't work, says Cloud Technology Partners. When cloud-first is the mandate, it's too easy to adopt cloud just because there's pressure to do so. Instead, cloud adoption takes work to find the right option. Fit is essential, and usually boils down to needs and features around security, compliance, application use and performance.

We like this rundown of a recent chat among IT leaders on using hybrid cloud. One interesting point is that Wikibon survey respondents five years ago thought that "cloud" was just a fuzzy buzzword. Now, 90% of survey respondents are using cloud in some form. That's a pretty quick turnaround. Chat survey results found that senior executives and line-of-business leaders are most influential on an organization's thinking on cloud adoption, with IT people and vendors lower on the list. (Check out our recent infographic on cloud brokership to see how you can move IT up on that list.)

And here's an update on how the financial sector is faring in the cloud. Banks, along with businesses in other regulated industries, were cloud-shy till just a few years ago. Public cloud providers have moved quickly to address security issues, though, with public cloud now often a more secure option than an on-premises data center. So banks are now taking another look at public cloud, when it makes economic sense, for its easy scalability. As with any other industry, it'll be critical to find the cloud mix that works for your business.