Microsoft customers on the great (hybrid) cloud migration

Microsoft’s enterprise customers are adopting its cloud software in droves, a survey of delegates at the vendor’s Ignite 2015 conference in Chicago reveals.

Nine in ten of the 267 delegates polled said their organisations are utilising cloud-based technologies and 84 per cent are currently using Microsoft Cloud.

Office 365 leads the pack with 58 per cent take-up among participants, followed in a close bunched of server tools:Hyper-V (35 per cent), System Center (34), Azure Public Cloud (32). Adoption for Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server stood at 14 per cent.

So this is a snapshot of Microsoft shops - organisations who are invested enough in the company to send staff to a Microsoft-centric enterprise IT conference. And we infer that a lot of the companies are somewhat ahead of the cloud take-up curve. But there are some more general nuggets to be gleaned from the survey, conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Cloud Cruiser, a cost tracking software vendor.

Just over half the respondents (53 per cent) are pursuing hybrid cloud as their preferred strategy, followed by on-premise private cloud (23 per cent), third party private cloud (18 per cent) and all public cloud (6 per cent). Thirty seven per cent of delegates had a quarter or more of their IT services in the cloud - which sounds high to us.

Considering the survey sponsor, it will not surprise you that the survey contains several questions about “tracking and understanding cloud usage’. Nearly three quarters of respondents (73 per cent) rated their capabilities here as good, very good or excellent. The rest were “poor” or “horrible”. Consumers of public cloud expressed desire for consumption data to compare vendors. ®