Cloud Computing

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CIOs surveyed by investment firm Piper Jaffray in its latest study have reported dissatisfaction with public cloud solutions, and are departing Google as their choice of public cloud provider.

The report, which polled 112 CIOs across eight industries, found nearly three quarters (73%) had allocated budget to private, hybrid or public cloud projects in 2015, yet the security of public cloud was cited by 35% of respondents as the primary reason for keeping data on premise.

Amazon Web Services remains the most popular public cloud provider and is growing, with 35% of respondents citing it compared to 33% in 2014. It was a similar story with the top three, Microsoft Azure (21% this year, 20% last year) and Rackspace (16% this year, 15% last year), while Google’s usage went down to 7% from 12%. IBM SoftLayer went up to 6% share, while other players – VMware, Verizon, Dell, Savvis, HP, polled 3% or less.

The results in the Piper Jaffray survey ring true when compared to recent industry research in the cloud infrastructure market, which showed Microsoft as taking the clear second place behind AWS – and according to the report, it indicates how organisations will continue to take up Microsoft in 2015.

Cloud budgets are up 6% year over year, with on-premises spending up 2%. 89% of those polled said they would expect their private cloud spending to increase, with a similar number (88%) agreeing for AWS and 70% saying their Microsoft Azure cloud spending would go up.

Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, told the WSJ that the Google losses were predominantly attributed to their losing the ‘initial branding war’ with AWS.

Google has been pushing its cloud options aggressively in recent months, offering one terabyte of free Drive storage to every customer who bought a Chromebook during December. Compare that with Microsoft allowing free unlimited storage to Office 365 customers, however, and it doesn’t look as rosy, even though Microsoft had a several hour outage in November.

About the Author

James Bourne

Writer

James has more than a decade of experience as a tech journalist, writer and editor, and served as Editor in Chief of TechForge Media between 2017 and 2021. James was named as one of the top 20 UK technology influencers by Tyto, and has also been cited by Onalytica, Feedspot and Zsah as an influential cloud computing writer.