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The Australian Cloud services market is expected to soar from $1.23 billion in 2013 to $4.55 billion by 2018, according to analyst firm, Frost and Sullivan.
Demand for cloud services is driven by data intensive applications required for back-end cloud applications needed to store and analyse the data.
According to the analyst firm, cost savings continue to be a key factor for switching to cloud services, with some organisations reporting an average 12 per cent in IT cost savings.
In 2013, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS); Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), made up the Australian cloud computing market, generating revenues of $1.23 billion.
Frost and Sullivan’s report, State of Cloud Computing in Australia 2014, indicated that despite the strong growth of cloud adoption in 2014, it will taper off as the market reaches a higher state of maturity.
IaaS and PaaS are expected to grow at a faster rate than SaaS.
“Two thirds of companies that have adopted cloud services believe it has significantly improved their overall business performance. A significant proportion of organisations feel it has enhanced their ability to innovate and explore new business models,” Frost and Sullivan A/NZ senior research manager, Phil Harpur, said.
“Education, mining and in particular, government and financial services, have been strong adopters of cloud in the last six to 12 months. Retail and manufacturing sectors are seeing strong adoption of cloud based business management applications.”
Some companies expressed hesitation to move to Cloud services due to security reasons based on giving away control on their key business processes and data.
“The dynamic nature of the cloud environment makes it more vulnerable to security threats and IT security requirements increase in complexity,” he said. “Few Cloud providers currently provide comprehensive security features built into their services, so companies must implement appropriate security policies to address these issues.”
The survey highlighted that organisations were also adopting Cloud management platforms to address the increasingly complex nature of Cloud services and applications.
The survey was conducted in July, involving 603 senior management level executives responsible for their company’s IT decision making, infrastructure or datacentre spending. All respondents businesses were required to have deployed some form of Cloud services.
