Cloud everyday

Both a recent market survey by Bitkom Research and the survey by Crisp Research presented on page 21 come to a similar conclusion: cloud computing is recognized and used - but on the basis of no market figures it is possible to speak of a unique selling proposition or hype.

Naturally, it is a success for the IT tool "cloud" when Bitkom states that last year 66 percent of the companies surveyed also used cloud computing. Just one year before that, however, the figure was 65 percent.

Due to the simplicity, transparency and low cost of cloud computing, the question would be: Why don't 99 percent use computing power from the cloud?

Cloud computing in the form of offerings from AWS, Google, and Microsoft is very easy to consume and doesn't cost much. Before ordering and installing a server to evaluate machine learning for a specific use case, going to cloud computing is not only faster, but also cheaper and more efficient: If the project fails, you cancel the virtual AI machine in the cloud; if the project becomes a success, you can scale immediately with full cost control.

Cloud computing is the first choice for many software developments, evaluations and time-limited tasks. This is also reflected in the survey results from Bitkom and Crisp.

About two-thirds of companies use cloud computing. That will remain the case. Perhaps the value will rise evolutionarily to three quarters. Among large companies, cloud use is already at 80 percent - but many other "IT tools" can also boast a similarly high market presence: Virtualization, Microsoft Office, Ethernet, ERP software from SAP, etc.

This unspectacular cloud computing routine can now be contrasted with the latest market data from Gartner on global server sales - and there you can see that the current IT music is playing somewhere else entirely: Worldwide server sales rose by 33 percent in the first quarter of this year, and shipments of server hardware increased by 17 percent.

In 2017, IT research and consulting firm Gartner observed growth in the global server market. This has now continued in the first quarter of 2018: The server market was driven by investments by large and medium-sized companies in hyperscale and data centers, says Gartner. It is observed that there is an increasing focus on on-premise and colocation services as well as public cloud solutions.

The "love" of having one's own data center and the associated demand for server hardware may have a very trivial reason - as can be read in the Bitkom study: the end-to-end availability of cloud services is crucial for commercial customers.

In the past, however, many companies complained about outages. Overall, seven out of ten cloud users were unable to access their cloud solutions for a short time. Technical problems on the part of the cloud provider (46 percent) were most frequently responsible for this.

At around one in four companies (23 percent), technical problems in internal IT were the reason, and at one in three companies (35 percent), a lack of network connectivity. (end of quote)

It is likely that the company's own data center will remain just as long and successful as cloud computing.