New data shows that fat cloud-focused IT budgets are becoming the norm. Are you moving too fast, too slow, or about right? Credit: Thinkstock Companies have decreased their spending on traditional system deployments to fund their cloud migration activities. Indeed, the IaaS market—including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google—has been exploding with growth over 40 percent in revenue per year since 2011, according to Gartner. And Gartner forecasts 300 percent growth for IaaS between 2016 and 2020. What’s most astounding is the shift in IT spending. The on-premises budgets for IT infrastrcuture will fall from 70.2 percent in 2016 to 57 percent by 2018, according to IDC—an 18.8 percent decline. In other words, the IaaS portion of IT infrastructure spend is rising from 29.8 percent to 43 percent—a 44.2 percent increase. Although a few enterprises are slow to start—and some have to yet to start—their migaations to cloud, many enterprises are blasting forward, with the funding and support to cloud-enable most of their enterprise IT by 2020. While there may appear to be a party going on and you’ve not been invited, my advice to enterprises is to proceed to the cloud at your own measured place. Indeed, while the growth numbers are impressive, I can’t help but think that some enterprises are moving so fast to the cloud that they are bound to make some very costly mistakes such as not dealing with security, governance, and operations properly for cloud-based systems. I’ve been making a nice living over the last year fixing these. But the larger danger is that you’re not taking advantage of what public cloud services can offer enterprises IT—and your business. Enterprises that are sitting on the fence are perhaps losing money because they are missing out on the cost and strategic benefits of the cloud. Most don’t bother to do the ROI analysis and planning, so they have no idea of how they are damaging their business. So, at what pace should you move to the cloud? The answer lies within your enterprise. Don’t go faster or slower to matc the pace of the enterprises down the street. Instead, you look at your own requirements and business problems first, then the examine best approaches and technologies to meet those requirements and solve your problems. Cloud Computing