Preparing for a talk this week I went searching for the latest estimates of how large the Australian cloud market is. Two companies are often quoted in the IT press as the market analysts, Gartner and IDC. True to form I found two recent estimates; IDC says A$2.33 billion by 2016, (CAGR of 24.8%), (IDC here), but Gartner says it’s already there at $2.4 billion in 2012, (Gartner here).
See the issue? They would argue they count different things, so you can’t really compare the numbers. Which I kind of understand, but what is the size of the market? Maybe that doesn’t really matter, what is important is it is now substantial and it’s growing fast!
What I’m seeing is that ‘cloud’ is now mainstream, just about everyone I speak to has deployed at least one cloud service. To generalise what I would say is that SMB’s are almost totally cloud, why would you purchase and look after infrastructure if you were a small business or a start-up? In the mid-tier it seems like the cloud is the second datacentre used for backup and DR. And at the high end it seems as if the cloud has become the third datacentre. (Perhaps active-active between the two primary datacentres with the cloud providing the third; test, dev, triangulated DR.)
Confidence is building as well, perhaps not in the Traditional public cloud providers as fast as its growing with the home-grown enterprise centric providers like Telstra, Optus, etc. (In-fact the IDC article above says 70% of their survey group agree with this.)
Anyone who is still riding the data-sovereignty and “patriot act” rationale for not adopting cloud, is breading shadow IT in their organisation. Which is very dangerous! There is now nothing stopping any user pulling out the corporate credit card and setting up that Dropbox or AWS service to get something done quickly. Now IT has no control and data security is totally breached! However providing a trusted, secure and enterprise facility which is readily available in Australia by some of Australia’s most trusted brands… does seem more logical to me.
Now if I convinced you to take the leap into the Australian cloud be aware of another prediction, 30% of cloud suppliers will be out of business by 2015, (IDC). So when choosing the vendor you still need the due-diligence as no matter how good your contract is, once an organisation goes under, your data and systems and processes go with it!
What’s your experience with the Australian Cloud?
Clive Gold 