As organizations aim to increase business agility and streamline costs, demand for public cloud services continues to grow exponentially, with Gartner predicting it will become the majority of new IT spending by 2016.
There’s no question that virtualized public clouds have revolutionized the technology landscape, giving cloud-savvy companies – from startups to other Internet-centric organizations – the leverage to scale at the speed of business while minimizing upfront operating expenses, reducing complexity and only paying for the capacity they need. Although most organizations initially relied on cloud services for non-mission critical workloads, such as testing and development, widespread adoption and the maturation of cloud platforms have increased confidence in migrating key business applications to the cloud. This, in turn, has led to a new generation of applications that are being architected from the ground up to run on standardized public cloud infrastructure.
However, for certain types of applications, virtual public clouds can present significant performance limitations due to the multi-tenant environment and processing overhead of the hypervisor layer, especially as traffic levels scale. This is particularly significant for the emerging generation of fast, big data applications, such as those that enable personalization and targeting through customer insights, social analytics, location mapping and visualization, and transactional analysis. These applications require public cloud infrastructure that can guarantee consistently high speed and ultra-low latency to enable massive amounts of uninterrupted data ingestion and real-time analysis, as well as cost-efficiency-at-scale.
This evolving application ecosystem with its intensive performance demands is placing new pressures on traditional public cloud services. Amid this shift, Internap surveyed nearly 250 Internet infrastructure decision makers to gain insight into cloud adoption, requirements and challenges – including the differences in feedback between the cloud-wise, those using cloud services, and the cloud-wary, those with no near-term plans to use cloud services. The details of these findings are reflected in this Cloud Landscape Report.
