Indianapolis-based IT-solutions firm, Scale Computing, released the results of an industry survey Wednesday, March 27. The purpose of the study was to analyze the relevant factors in American companies’ decision-making processes about how they choose to run their back-end operations. The main contenders in the survey were localized hyperconvergence options, and cloud service. The results showed an overwhelming preference for local infrastructure, and was targeted primarily to midsize businesses, citing the cloud as insufficient to serve their needs.
Nearly 3,300 IT professionals throughout the nation gave their input to the survey across a variety of industries and company sizes. The majority of the companies that participated had fewer than 500 employees, ranking the results of the survey to be primarily relevant to small and medium sized businesses. 9 out of 10 survey participants submitted that they prefer to keep their mission-critical data and applications stored on-site in local infrastructure units rather than on the cloud. Additionally, only 3% of the companies represented in the survey reported having all of their virtualized operations and data on a cloud network.
Unsurprisingly, the main motivation cited for this decision was to keep company costs as low as possible. The initial investment into on-site virtualization was noted by participants to be less costly to their company operations than cloud service in the long run. Security was also found to be a primary concern when choosing a route for maintaining back-end. The survey claims that a substantial portion of its participants felt very uncomfortable with moving their mission-critical applications and data to a cloud server. An on-site solution was generally regarded to be more secure when compared with the cloud.
According to industry blogger, Stephen Foskett, “this survey confirms that small and midsized businesses desperately need to both simplify and virtualize their environments.” In keeping with Foskett’s sentiment, the survey found that 90 percent of its respondents stated that it was ‘important or very important’ to have all company sensitive operations to be located within company-owned infrastructure. Conversely, the cloud option was considered to be untrustworthy by comparison.
In light of the survey results, Scale Computing purported their HC3 product, a hyperconvergence solution, to be the superior option. Scale claims the HC3 to satisfy the outstanding concerns of the study’s participants. The market survey was conducted by ApplicationContinuity.org