RightScale recently released its annual State of the Cloud Report and per usual there were some interesting findings, including the fact that 13 percent of respondents spend more than $500,000 a month on cloud services. That’s a lot of dough.
What’s more, 26 percent of enterprises using public cloud spend more than $6 million per year and overall 71 percent of enterprises are growing public cloud spend at more than 20 percent a year.
Before we go much further with these findings, no vendor-sponsored survey ever tells the whole story. RightScale says it emailed 66,783 people from its database. Of that, 997 responded and 19 percent are RightScale users. They claim 3.08 percent margin of error with 95 percent confidence.
Still, take it as you will, as a window into the cloud usage of a variety of respondents with over half having more than 1000 employees and a quarter having between 1 and 100 employees. Over half was from North America, but there was healthy representation from Europe and Asia Pacific. The rest of the world accounted for 8 percent of respondents.
Regardless, this is a view into the cloud computing habits of the small, medium and large organizations who responded and they are spending some cash on cloud. Perhaps most surprising was that eight percent of the people who bothered to respond actually have no cloud plans.
Who’s in?
The fact is that we know the public cloud is growing and continues to grow at a high rate. Many expect that growth to continue for some to come. Synergy Research, a group we quote fairly often in this blog, found that overall the cloud grew 46 percent last year. When you have public cloud revenue rates running upwards of $4-5 billion a quarter for some of the most successful companies, that money has to be coming from somewhere, and those large companies with big spends are handing over a lot of cash to the cloud vendors.
Not all of the money among the respondents is going to the public cloud though. There is also a fair amount going to private and hybrid efforts that cross private and public cloud projects. And it’s always important to remember this is not a zero sum game as many respondents report having a multi-cloud effort across multiple vendors (or public and private clouds).
All in all, the numbers make sense. They may not be gospel, but you can certainly learn from them about overall patterns across small, medium and large businesses, and one thing is clear. The cloud is mainstream now and it’s worth a serious amount of money, regardless of the type, and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.
Photo: ESB Professional / Shutterstock.
