14 DAY TRIAL // Cloud-based services for enterprises are beginning to become popular with businesses but a new report challenges the common belief that small businesses are more interested in cloud-based virtual servers. The report, by Forrester Research and cited by PC World, shows that only 15 percent of small businesses, with 6 to 99 employees, are currently using or planning to use hosted virtual sever services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.
This, while 18 percent of mid-sized companies, with 100 to 999 employees, are interested in hosted virtual servers. The most likely to use such services however are big enterprises, with more than 1000 employees, of which 25 percent are currently interested.
The findings are surprising as currently most experts believe small businesses would have more to gain from using cloud-based services on account of the cost benefits. "This contradicts the conventional wisdom that because smaller companies lack IT skills, economies of scale, and cash for IT investment, they will be more interested in external service providers such as IaaS than larger companies," Forrester analyst Frank Gillett wrote. "We believe this is because larger firms are more tuned into many new IT trends and are further along in adopting x86 server virtualization, which is a prerequisite enabling technology for compute-as-a-service, whether internal or external."
While businesses are getting more interested in cloud-based solutions, for now few are using hosted virtual servers. The numbers are expected to grow quickly as the emerging technological solution gains traction. The survey also shows that most companies would rather use external sources for their virtual servers rather than building their own internal cloud infrastructure. Only 22 percent of large enterprises are using or planning to use an internal cloud with 17 percent of medium-sized and only 10 percent of small businesses having the same plans.