Cloud Adoption Increases as More Educators Use Cloud Services

Educators and government workers help drive cloud adoption in their organizations, a 2013 State of the Cloud Report shows.

In a CDW-G survey of 1,242 IT professionals across six sectors, 73 percent say their employees' personal use of cloud apps has somewhat or significantly influenced their organizations' decisions to move toward cloud computing.?On top of that, 68 percent of IT professionals said employee requests for cloud services have increased over the last two years.

These professionals answered the survey questions in August and September 2012, and the results were released on Monday, Feb. 11. The whole survey sample has a margin of error of ?2.7 percent, while industry sub-groups have a margin of error of ?7.9 percent.

Because employees have been using cloud services personally, they're influencing their organizations to start using cloud, implement it quickly, and bring it to their business units. Higher education and K-12 cloud adoption and maintenance jumped significantly in 2012 from the previous year. But according to this survey, state and local government is much slower to adopt.

Cloud Computing Adoption and Maintenance	Higher Education	K-12 Education	State and Local Government
2012	43%	42%	27%
2011	34%	27%	23%
Percent Change	+9%	+15%	+4%

These three industries all cite the same top two barriers to cloud adoption: concerns with security of proprietary data or applications and performance of cloud services. But the third barrier is unique to each sector.

In higher education, the third barrier is understanding who's responsible for what when it comes to service level agreements with vendors. These agreements don't always make that clear.

In K-12 education, integrating cloud apps or infrastructure with legacy systems is the third largest barrier.

In state and local government, senior-level managers who aren't in IT are holding the organization back from adopting cloud services. This concern could explain in part why state and local government is moving to the cloud much more slowly than schools and universities.?

Overall, storage, and conferencing and collaboration are the top two services or applications that are moving to the cloud. Forty percent of K-12 IT professionals alone have their storage in the cloud, compared to 31 percent in higher education and 19 percent in state and local government.

Following the money trail, IT leaders across industries say they're currently saving 13 percent of their budget by using cloud resources and applications. And over four years, they project to see savings of 25 percent.

Main image courtesy of Shutterstock

This story was originally published at the Center for Digital Education

Source: http://www.govtech.com/e-government/Cloud-Adoption-Increases-as-More-Educators-Use-Cloud-Services.html

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