Applications most commonly operated in the cloud are commodity applications such as email (50% of cloud users), file storage (39%), web and video conferencing (36% and 32%, respectively), and online learning (34%).
While many organizations (84%) say they have already employed at least one cloud application, most do not yet identify themselves as cloud users who are implementing or maintaining cloud computing. CDW defines cloud computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned.
Respondents estimated that, on average, only 42 percent of their current services and applications have potential to operate in the cloud. Even the respondents who identified themselves as cloud users– currently implementing or maintaining cloud computing – said they expect to spend no more than one-third of their IT budget (34%) on cloud computing by 2016, and at the same time, to save 31% of their IT budget by using cloud resources and applications. Non-cloud users said they expect to spend slightly more than one-quarter of their IT budget (28%) on cloud computing by 2016, and to save 23% by using cloud computing resources and applications.
Among current cloud users, 84 percent said they cut application costs by moving to the cloud. On average, cloud users report saving 21 percent annually on those applications moved to the cloud.