If you were to put together a list of the top 10 technology trends over the last five years, cloud would certainly have to be one of them. Like other of today’s major IT developments, it’s evolving so fast that it can sometimes be difficult to gain the perspective you need to decide how to approach it.  In its third such report, “State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2016,” Verizon does a nice job in 12 pages lending some perspective. The report shows how the cloud environment has changed, describes how this is changing the game for companies, and provides recommendations for cloud adoption.  For this report, Verizon drew upon a survey of its enterprise-level cloud customers, research it commissioned through Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, and third-party research from Forrester Consulting, Gartner, and IDC.

A noteworthy statistic from the Verizon report is that 84 percent of companies surveyed indicate that their cloud use has increased during the past year. Perhaps more telling than that figure, however, is that half of them will be using cloud for at least 75 percent of their workloads by 2018.

No Longer Enough
Just to Be Using Cloud

What this means, though, is that, since everybody is doing cloud now, it no longer represents a significant competitive advantage all by itself. According to the report, “using cloud is now just table stakes.”  Learn more at the Cisco Learning Network.