The cloud computing landscape of 2017 will increasingly be dominated by platform and database services supporting hybrid infrastructures, a report said.

Private cloud adoption is rapidly reaching maturity, with almost two thirds (60 per cent) of enterprises having reached intermediate or mature levels of adoption, added the new study conducted by IDG Connect on behalf of Oracle.

Meanwhile, traditional barriers to private cloud adoption, such as concerns over security, are being joined by newer worries such as IT standardization and the ability to integrate with existing applications. These new concerns reflect the lessons learned from widespread private cloud adoption, and help to explain why enterprises are making hybrid the priority for their cloud expansion plans.

Organizations are more likely to choose hybrid cloud when considering their next steps in cloud computing. Deploying more hybrid cloud services (36 per cent) was selected ahead of private (32 per cent) and public cloud (17 per cent) services.

Private cloud is rapidly reaching maturity, with almost two thirds (60 per cent) of enterprises surveyed reporting intermediate or mature levels of adoption. This is expected to rise to 82 per cent in 2017.

Significant concerns still surround private cloud adoption. These include data security (cited by 55 per cent of respondents), integration with existing applications (47 per cent), available skills (45 per cent) and hardware costs (44 per cent).

The growing maturity of private cloud means that organizations have learned many lessons about how to deploy cloud successfully. The most important building block of a successful private cloud infrastructure is having effective governance controls in place (cited by 34 per cent); followed by standardization of IT (27 per cent), winning the support of key decision makers (25 per cent) and ensuring strong IT change management (17 per cent).

Within private cloud, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (68 per cent) is currently viewed as most important ahead of Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) (61 per cent) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) (57 per cent). However, this will change over the next two years with DaaS (29 per cent) becoming the most important form of private cloud, ahead of PaaS (26 per cent) and SaaS (23 per cent).

John Abel, EMEA senior director at Oracle, said: “The recent acceleration in cloud adoption has been focused on enterprise applications and addressing the related integration, scalability and security challenges.”

“Our survey shows however, that as the hybrid cloud evolves into the core approach for businesses the platform grows in importance, providing as it must the ability for businesses to move from private to public cloud and back seamlessly and securely. In this environment, Oracle’s proven ‘cloud ready’ platform proves hugely beneficial to customers, delivering a secure and reliable platform that removes integration headaches and provides customers the quickest route-to-value from the hybrid cloud.”

“While SaaS has traditionally led enterprise migration to the cloud, other services such as Database- and Platform-as-a-Service are set to become more important over the next two years,” said Bob Johnson, vice president and principal analyst, at IDG Connect.

“This trend reflects how quickly the cloud is growing in maturity and sophistication. Given this rapid development in cloud capability, it’s likely that 2017 will see widespread use of cloud-based platforms and tools – increasingly delivered over hybrid architectures – to develop and test transformational business applications,” Johnson concluded. – TradeArabia News Service