At half of businesses, public cloud data use expected to rise next year

Dive Brief:

Over half (54%) of IT managers expect the volume of data they store in public cloud servers to increase in the next 12 months, according to a study published Tuesday by the Harvard Business Review and enterprise data company Cloudera.
Though 69% of organizations see a data strategy as key to reaching business goals, just 35% believe they have the analytics and data management capabilities in place to get there. The study surveyed 185 executives from a mix of industries, half of them from businesses with $1 billion or more in revenue.
Traditional and bleeding-edge tech initiatives drive the thirst for cloud computing. While 80% of surveyed decision makers rely on the cloud for data warehousing or business intelligence needs, half of companies say they expect to put artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms in place by 2022.

Dive Insight:

Cloud computing is playing a key role in IT's transformation, helping companies redefine business strategies and find efficiencies not spotted before.

But transformation is not happening all at once. According to Mick Hollison, chief marketing officer at Cloudera, though cloud usage is expected to rise, most businesses have yet to fully get their hands on the promise of cloud computing.

"This means that they're still struggling to put data in the forefront of not just how they make decisions, but how they grow and innovate," Hollison said, in an interview with CIO Dive.

Half of IT managers in the survey said they're ready for deploying multiple public clouds, a trend that has pushed vendors including Cloudera to accommodate client multicloud needs.

"If [these platforms] can't talk to one another, you'll have a hard time dealing with that widespread data growth," Hollison said.

Gartner's recent workplace predictions signal further demand growth for public cloud. The analyst firm depicts factories and offices where human efficiency is boosted by artificial intelligence.

Analysts say CIOs who take a cloud-first approach to building their technology and partner with the entire C-suite stand to make the most of their cloud computing investments.