IHS Technology announced this week that spending for cloud infrastructure and services will reach about $174.2 billion this year.  That’s a 20 percent increase from the year before.  It’s an indicator of this continuing shift towards cloud services that was breaking away from what many consider to be traditional infrastructures.  As apps, services, and infrastructure undergoes this migration, one can make a distinct correlation with revenue around this, both in savings from rapid, scalable, and cost-saving cloud strategies and revenues for companies offering cloud services.  By the year 2017, that cloud spending number is projected to reach $235.1 billion.  So big things in cloud market are reinforced by yet another report.  Of course we’re talking cloud here and that means there’s a lot of varying definitions and murkiness around the topic, something that has always been a part of the cloud conversation.  One field where there is absolute clarity is in cloud-storage solutions.  The enterprise is definitely integrating more and more cloud-storage and that is somewhere in those numbers.  Consumer-level cloud-storage options have a number of players like Dropbox and Box that have become popular choices, largely because of freemium models.  The enterprise market however has more demanding needs for control and security around cloud-storage.

Echoing the results of ESG’s research brief (see below), “The Demand for Hybrid Online File Sharing  Solutions,” Egnyte has found an increasing interest in hybrid demand as well. Egnyte is reporting that 7 out of 10 customers are currently moving to a hybrid model within 90 days of deployment and roughly 75% of their partners are listing hybrid as one of their top three solution focus areas in 2014.

Hybrid Cloud Storage options

Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain sees this as a direct result of the Enterprise’s interest in having options for different types of their company data. Choice can be a very powerful thing for IT, especially when other file-sharing platforms are extremely limiting in certain aspects.

New ESG Report Shows Strong Demand For Hybrid Online File Sharing Solutions

Egnyte Momentum Echoes Findings; 7 out of 10 Customers
Move to Hybrid Within First 90 Days of Deployment

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. – February 20, 2014 – Egnyte, the provider of the most comprehensive file-sharing platform for the enterprise, today announced the results of a sponsored report from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), which finds that more than two-thirds of current OFS customers are extremely interested in hybrid online file sharing solutions (OFS), citing flexibility and control over data as the top factor driving interest.  Egnyte customer deployments echo these findings with 7 out of 10 customers moving to hybrid within the first 90 days of deployment, more than 2/3 of all customer inquiries and pilots demanding hybrid as a part of their file sharing deployment model and more than three-fourths of Egnyte partners naming hybrid as one of their top three solution focus areas this year.

 

According to the report, “The Demand for Hybrid Online File Sharing Solutions”  published last week, ESG found that more than two-thirds (69%) of respondents who had used an online file sharing solution for at least 6 months said they were now very interested in the ability to store some or all of their data on-premises storage resources.

The report cites the top factors driving interest in keeping some of all data on-premises among current OFS users as follows:

• Ability and flexibility to control where data is stored – 54%
• Ability to leverage existing on-premises infrastructure investments – 41%
• Belief that we can control data better than third-party services – 38%
• Concern over accessibility of public cloud-based data to third parties – 36%
• Need to comply with government regulations – 35%
• Concern over OFS provider employees’ level of access to data – 34%
• Local copy of data helps to mitigate performance concerns – 34%
• Need to comply with industry regulations – 33%
• Better balance of fixed (i.e., CAPEX) and variable (i.e., OPEX) costs makes budgeting easier – 31%

“The overwhelming number of hybrid deployments we’re seeing across customers of all sizes speaks volumes about where the online file sharing market is headed,” said Egnyte VP Worldwide Field Operations Steve Erbst. “Simply put, it’s a matter of providing customers a choice.  The cloud is great for some data & use cases but others, especially data sets that need to stay behind the firewall need to be addressed –and accessed differently. That’s where Egnyte comes in and delivers a win-win for everyone, including our customers AND our partners. ”

So there you have it, big uptake for hybrid cloud-storage worldwide as the cloud phenomenon continues to expand and revolutionize the enterprise.

photo credit: Sanctuary photography → back ! maybe :p via photopin cc