Modern Businesses Love Cloud Services, but Most Remain In the Tech Stone Age
The tech giants love providing cloud services. It's easy and cheap for them to open up their server farms to the masses for use, and they reap the profits. Look at the list above, and you see three major companies—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—leading the charge with most industry professionals who use cloud services picking AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
In fact, according to the data (collected by RightScale and Flexera in January by talking to 768 tech pros, and quantified by our friends at Statista), Google Cloud is the one to watch, as more industry pros are experimenting with it than they are with the rest. Fourteen percent say they plan to use Google's services compared with 13 percent who plan to use VMware Cloud. Next is 9 percent who say they'd use Microsoft Azure. On the low end is Alibaba Cloud out of China—but cloud services are the fastest growing segment of Alibaba's business, growing 66 percent year to year.
This is all well and good if you work at a business that would or even could use the cloud. According to a report by Forrester's Infrastructure and Operations research group, commissioned by ScienceLogic, only 12 percent of enterprises businesses are using entirely modern tools.
A further breakdown indicates that 49 percent use a mix of modern and legacy tech tools, and a staggering 37 percent are using legacy tools only. They're no closer to the cloud than worms at this point. It's no shock that the report further states that their business agility is highly compromised and that "this lack of digital maturity underscores the prohibitive nature of legacy tools." Meaning, some can't even use new digital tech because their old tools can't handle them. No cloud for you if you're still running Windows 95.
The full report goes into more depth about the problems legacy tools pose and potential benefits for companies that make the difficult digital transitions they've been avoiding. Simply getting on the cloud may not be enough if their current tools can't even help manage it. As the report succinctly puts it: "Those with legacy tools are focused more on survival than transformation."
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.