Profile of Cloud-Adopter Companies
September 28, 2011
There is a strong correlation between the culture of a company and how a company approaches the cloud. An excellent white paper by Michael Heric, Ron Kermisch and Stephen Bertrand of Bain & Company examines company cultures in relation to the cloud computing and categorizes cloud customer profiles into five types…
Price Conscious (12 percent of companies) – These companies chiefly value cost savings and are satisfied with the current state of cloud security.
Safety Conscious (22 percent of companies) – This type of company is the inverse of the price conscious company. These companies are risk-adverse. They see value in the cloud but they have concerns about security. Safety-conscious companies are more likely to consider and adopt private cloud and hybrid public-cloud models.
Transformational (11 percent of companies) – These are early adopter companies which have already moved more than 40 percent of their IT infrastructure into the cloud. These companies consider themselves innovators and are open to change.
Heterogeneous (11 percent of companies) – These companies have begun using the cloud, although, on average, have only 13 percent of their environment has moved into the cloud. A distinguishing feature of these companies is that they have embraced virtualization. The Bain report sees large-scale adoption of in-house virtualization as an important preliminary step before moving to the cloud. Cloud usage for heterogeneous companies is expected to grow to 40 percent within the next two years.
Slow and Steady (44 percent of companies) – These companies are not yet using the cloud, but they are tracking the cloud and are interested in the possible benefits that it affords. Very often the company culture at these companies is to be slow and deliberate in making any changes to operations. The majority of companies fall into this profile.