More than Half of Small Businesses Plan to Run Entire IT in Cloud by 2020: Report

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Corporate adoption of cloud-only IT will more than double in the next two years to 26 percent, according to a survey released by cloud management, analytics, and security services company BetterCloud. The survey also found that over half of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will run 100 percent of their IT in the cloud within five years.

BetterCloud surveyed 1,500 IT professionals representing organizations in 53 countries for its “Trends in Cloud IT,” asking them about cloud adoption, cloud office systems, and application usage. The results show that rapid cloud adoption is expected, but just how rapid depends on several factors.

The survey found that 12 percent of companies currently run all of their IT in the cloud. By 2020, 62 percent are expected to run cloud-only IT, although the curve starts to level off at that point, and a minority of organizations believe they will never run all IT from the cloud.

Companies using Google Apps are more than twice as likely to be cloud-only at this point, and 17 percent more are expected to be cloud-only in five years (66 to 49 percent). Other major factors in cloud-only adoption include the company’s size and age, with smaller, younger companies significantly more likely to adopt cloud, and less likely to have legacy services they have already invested in.

Almost all businesses (96 percent) less than five years old plan to run all IT from the cloud by 2026, while larger enterprises will only reach 50 percent cloud-only adoption in 2025.

The adoption of cloud applications is much different, interestingly. Enterprises are expected to go from 18 cloud applications today to 52 in 2017, a 185 percent increase while SMBs expect an 86 percent increase.

“It’s expected for larger organizations to run more cloud applications, but it’s the acceleration of cloud app usage that is impressive,” BetterCloud CEO and founder David Politis said in a blog post on the survey’s first batch of data. “The data shows that we could be reaching a tipping point where enterprises are truly embracing cloud applications.”

Cloud service providers have geared offerings towards enticing SMB adoption while the window of opportunity in the market is wide open. 1&1 Internet and CodeGuard both launched solutions with lowered barriers to entry already this month.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/more-than-half-of-small-businesses-plan-to-run-entire-it-in-cloud-by-2020-report