Tech radar cloud computing q4 2014

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TechRadar™: Cloud Computing, Q4 2014by James Staten, John R. Rymer, December 12, 2014

For: CIOs

Key TaKeaways

seven Cloud Computing segments are Here To stayWhen a product category enters the Growth phase of our market-maturity model, it has arrived as a fixture in customer landscapes. SaaS, integration, SQL database, file sharing, storage-as-a-service, and cloud platforms have attained Growth status. Cloud billing has progressed even further to the Equilibrium phase, or common practice phase.

Vendors are Creating Important New Cloud Computing segmentsOur analysis uncovered another characteristic of a mature market: Vendors are specializing within segments to address a greater variety of customer needs. Two new database segments join our analysis, as well as two new private-cloud and two new cloud-management categories.

Desktop-as-a-service and Private Clouds Continue To struggleDesktop-as-a-service and internal private clouds remind us that cloud-computing services are an awkward fit for some enterprise requirements. Both of these categories have seen light adoption and remain relatively immature. The desktop services aren’t configurable enough for many enterprises, and private clouds, despite widespread claims to the contrary, are too difficult to fund and build for most enterprises.

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© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

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wHy ReaD THIs RePoRT

Customers no longer question cloud computing as a viable technology choice; in a growing number of enterprises, cloud is now the first choice. Since our 2011 TechRadar™ on cloud computing, nearly all segments of cloud computing services have progressed in maturity, although public cloud services lead the way. Software-as-a-service, cloud billing services, and public cloud platforms are now permanent features of the tech management landscape. And fast-growing new categories in data management and private clouds have emerged. This TechRadar assesses the maturity of the 15 most important cloud service categories. Use this research to refine your strategic road map of cloud services.

Table of Contents

Cloud Computing adoption Is strong

overview: TechRadar For Cloud Computing

seven of 15 Categories are Growing Rapidly

reCommendaTIons

Be strategic about which services you Choose For which Purposes

supplemental Material

notes & resources

Forrester interviewed 11 subject matter experts for this report.

related research documents

accelerate market responsiveness With a Holistic Cloud strategyJune 9, 2014

Understand The Cloud service Provider market Landscapemay 19, 2014

The seismic shift In application Portfoliosmarch 12, 2014

TechRadar™: Cloud Computing, Q4 2014Tools and Technology: The Cloud Computing Playbookby James staten, John r. rymerwith Glenn o’donnell, dave Bartoletti, david K. Johnson, rob Koplowitz, noel Yuhanna, Peter sheldon, Lauren nelson, Henry Baltazar, Liz Herbert, and michael Caputo

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Techradar™: Cloud Computing, Q4 2014 2

© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited December 12, 2014

ClouD CoMPuTING aDoPTIoN Is sTRoNG

Public cloud computing services are now an ingredient in technology management’s recipe for delivering better applications with greater flexibility to find, serve, and retain customers.1 Business leaders and developers lead the charge on public cloud, but CIOs are now on board as well. The result: Enterprise customers are driving the growth and maturity of public cloud services.

The proof of cloud’s value is evident in the public cloud market’s hypergrowth, as well as the growing volume of enterprise case studies demonstrating fast time-to-market, cost-efficiency, and business flexibility.2 Duplicating these benefits in on-premises cloud environments, often referred to as private clouds, is proving to be extremely difficult for customers. Hence, the private cloud market lags the public cloud market in revenues and maturity.3

Cloud Computing Is Key To enterprise BT agendas

Forrester defines cloud computing as a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet-standard technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way. Used correctly, cloud services will power your business technology (BT) agenda in ways prior generations of technology cannot. Cloud computing differs from traditional on-premises and hosting environments in three key ways:

■ Standardized: The service is delivered to all customers in exactly the same way. Cloud services are designed as multitenant capabilities with broad appeal. The service’s core functions are standardized and offered to clients as is — take it or leave it. The degree of customization is very limited, and customers cannot alter the service’s underlying configuration. As a result, these services deliver greater economies of scale, because in most cases, the service is deployed once and used by multiple customers at the same time. In the case of software-as-a-service (SaaS), this usually means that the application is a single instance that all customers share. Cloud services can also be enhanced much more rapidly; it’s possible to add new capabilities as often as every two weeks, which means that enterprises can gain access to innovations and new capabilities much faster.

■ Pay-per-use: Customers enjoy unprecedented cost flexibility. Most cloud computing services are priced by consumption (whether by resources consumed or named user consuming a fixed service), and in most cases, if you stop consuming them, the billing stops. Not all players in this market fully adhere to this characteristic when selling their products. Many require a minimum contract and are experimenting with business models to differentiate themselves and better fit certain customers’ buying criteria. But nearly all cloud vendors track consumption and factor this into their pricing.

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■ Self-service: Customers can consume at scales of their choosing. Self-service doesn’t mean that there’s a web page where you can order the service. Instead, it means that the services can be provisioned with no human intervention, sales calls, service tickets, or lengthy procurement processes. This implies that procurement of the service is fully automated — and to deliver cloud services cost-effectively, this is essential.

still, what you Don’t Know Can Hurt you

Cloud customers are also maturing, but there are still risks of using cloud incorrectly. Customers can consume public cloud services without needing the support of technology managers. This has led many business leaders and developers to go it alone, provisioning and consuming cloud services not only without involving tech management but, in many cases, explicitly bypassing your organization. This bypass, known as “shadow IT,” has been rampant in larger enterprises for several years; according to our surveys and inquiries, as many as 25% of global developers claim to use cloud services despite only 19% of global business and technology hardware decision-makers indicating they have adopted public cloud.4

Sadly, many developers and business leaders consuming cloud services in this way don’t have the same experience as I&O professionals, security and risk management pros, and enterprise architects, and thus don’t know how to protect and sustain the enterprise and its data and application assets when using cloud services. Many consumers of public cloud services:

■ Assume the service will support their “ility” requirements. Cloud services typically offer service-level agreements (SLAs) covering security, application availability, backup and recovery, and/or service performance. But those SLAs stop at the shared, multitenant service being delivered — they do not extend to your specific customizations or integrations. As such, the base cloud service SLA may or may not meet your enterprise’s specific requirements. This makes it very difficult for nontechnical pros, especially in procurement and finance, to interpret how a cloud service provider’s commitments will play out in practice.

■ Don’t understand “the uneven handshake.” Cloud service providers take responsibility for only the services they provide — and those services may provide only part of a whole business solution. For example, public cloud platforms offer SLAs for either the middleware or the virtual infrastructure they provide. Maintaining and sustaining anything a developer builds atop these resources — or any configuration setting developers make (such as ports they open) — is the customer’s, not the cloud provider’s, responsibility. Forrester calls this relationship “the uneven handshake.”

Many cloud buyers learn the hard way about their shared responsibilities with cloud providers. When one of the Microsoft Azure data centers had a well-publicized outage in August 2014, many enterprise applications (and more than a few startup companies) went dark for a few hours.5 Had

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they leveraged best practices like ensuring their applications were deployed across availability boundaries, their applications may have lived through the outage. (Your I&O staff may understand these practices.) Letting your developers learn by doing puts revenues at risk.

The uneven handshake applies differently to different services. Some services — SaaS and cloud platforms — are broad both in their potential value and in the scope of their SLAs. Other services — file management, desktop-as-a-service — are much narrower in value and SLA impact. Understanding the major types of cloud services — who they’re for, what makes them valuable, and their level of maturity — will help guide your adoption as well as your thinking about how best to meet corporate security, reliability, and manageability needs.

oVeRVIew: TeCHRaDaR FoR ClouD CoMPuTING

Forrester investigated the current state of the 15 biggest categories in this market. We examined past research and interviewed 11 experts in the field to assess four factors: 1) the current state of the technology; 2) the technology’s potential impact on the customer’s business; 3) the time experts think the technology will need to reach the next stage of maturity; and 4) the technology’s overall adoption trajectory — from minimal success to significant success.6

This TechRadar examines services that are (see Figure 1):

■ A true fit with Forrester’s definition of a cloud service. This TechRadar analyzes only cloud service areas with multiple vendor offerings that meet our definition of cloud computing. If a vendor solution claimed this categorization but was not multitenant, was not cloud-resident, or lacked per-use accountability, autodeployment, and self-service access, we rejected it from the analysis.

■ Publicly and commercially available as finished services. We only examined categories that have commercially available offerings.

■ Business services — not consumer services. We included cloud services designed primarily for business use, not consumer use. Thus, we excluded services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapfish.

■ Horizontal products relevant across industries. We limited our analysis to solutions useful to enterprises in many industries. We excluded any cloud service that is only applicable to manufacturing, financial services, or another vertical market due to how its solution is implemented.

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Figure 1 TechRadar™: Cloud Computing, Q4 ’14 Technologies Evaluated

Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution prohibited.119045

Cloud billing

A multitenant, Internet-based billing, and payment processing service that can be integrated via web services and application programming interfaces (APIs). These services apply to digital goods rather than physical goods.

Used to add payment processing to a website, Internet-based application (software-as-a-service) or data service, and/or Internet-connected application (such as an iPhone application)

Amazon Web Services, Aria Systems, Google, Zuora

Multiple pricing models. Common are subscription models with per-invoice costs. Overall, costs are typically less than 2% per transaction.

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors

Estimated cost to implement

Cloud cost monitoring software

Applications that track and report on cloud platform resource use.

Cloud cost monitoring detects, records, presents holistic data, and generates alerts regarding public cloud provider costs. This form of monitoring allows the operator to track cloud usage costs over time, spot trends in consumption, and identify cost problems.

Cloudyn, Cloudability, Cloud Cruiser, Datapipe, Newvem

Priced typically per resource managed on a monthly basis

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Cloud workload management software

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


SaaS-based application deployment and con�guration tools that assist in provisioning and management of applications to cloud platforms

To provide robust con�guration options that are platform-independent. These solutions map con�guration and deployment requirements to the speci�c implementations and APIs of the target platforms.

Cisco, CSC, DCM, Dell, MuleSoft, Rightscale, Red Hat, Scalr

Priced typically per resource managed on a monthly basis.

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Figure 1 TechRadar™: Cloud Computing, Q4 ’14 Technologies Evaluated (Cont.)


Database-as-a-service (SQL)

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


An Internet-based multitenant SQL database provisioned on demand and billed by consumption

Application test and development, department collaboration, Internet application data (integration via web services or service-oriented architecture [SOA]), small and medium-size business (SMB) applications, data archival, and database backup storage

Amazon Web Services, EnterpriseDB, Google, Microsoft, salesforce.com, Rackspace

Free to try; as low as $0.10 per gigabyte (GB) per month

Database-as-a-service (NoSQL)

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


An Internet-based multitenant database provisioned on demand and billed by consumption. Includes cloud-based data storage.

Application test and development, Internet application data (big data analytics), and document-oriented applications.

Amazon Web Services, GoGrid, Google, IBM, Microsoft, MongoLab

Free to try; starting at $0.25 per gigabyte (GB) per month after �rst 100 MB

Data-warehouse-as-a-service

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


An Internet-based multitenant relational DBMS for traditional business reporting and business intelligence provisioned on demand and billed by consumption.

Consolidation of data into marts and warehouses for relational and multidimensional (cube) reporting applications.

Amazon Web Services, BitYota, Talend, Teradata

Starting at $0.85 per gigabyte (GB) per hour for on demand

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Disaster-recovery-as-a-service

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DR-as-a-service) providers back up or replicate physical or virtual servers to the service provider’s multitenant environment, which consists of virtual servers and shared storage. In the case of disaster declaration, the service provider recovers its customers’ servers as virtual servers hosted in the provider’s environment.

DR-as-a-service providers aim to provide backup for IT systems at remote sites and protection and recovery for business-critical IT systems (typically Windows only).

Service providers: Axcient, CA Technologies Instant Recovery On Demand, Geminare Recovery as a Service, Hosting.com, i365 EVault, IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS), iland Continuity Cloud, Qwest Real-Time Application Recovery, SmartCloudDR, SunGard Virtual Server Replication, Teneros DR-as-a-Service

Technology enablers: Acti�o DR, QuorumLabs, Vision Solutions Double-Take Cloud Protection & Recovery

Pricing includes all the software, infrastructure, and services to deliver the solution, typically priced per gigabyte (GB) of data, per server, or a combination of the two. The only cost not included in the price is the cost of network connectivity. You pay for only the servers you want to protect. Backup services are usually priced per GB, anywhere from $4 to $6 per GB, and replication services are priced per server, anywhere from $800 to $1,000.

Desktop-as-a-service

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Delivery and management of virtual desktop environments from a multitenant Internet-resident service

Desktop replacement, temporary desktop environment access, disaster recovery, and alternative desktop environments for consumers

Amazon Web Services, DeskStream, Dell, dinCloud, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, ICC Global Hosting, Navisite, Rackspace, SIMtone, SoftBank, T-Systems Enterprise Services, ThinDesk, ThinkGrid, tuCloud, Virtuon, VMware, Wipro

Around $100 per desktop per month, not including management software or integration costs

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Hosted private clouds

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Cloud infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on- or off-premises.

VM- and web-services-based modern application development and deployment.

AT&T, Blue Box, Canopy, CenturyLink, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Datapipe, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Joyent, Orange Business Services, Rackspace, Verizon, Virtustream, VMware, and VooServers

Ranges greatly. For a 20 to 40 VM environment that �uctuates in a given month, prices can range from $530 to $7,000. For a 120 to 140 VM environment that �uctuates in a given month, prices can range from $7,400 to $50,000. Depending on the size of the environment, VM performance and size requirements, tenancy of storage resources, and vendor selected prices range drastically.

Integration-as-a-service

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Multitenant, Internet-delivered application integration services

Enterprise application integration (EAI) between SaaS services and between SaaS and on-premises applications, database and data warehouse loading, and service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based integration.

Dell, Hubspan, IBM, Informatica, Mulesoft, OpSource, Pervasive Software, SAP, SnapLogic, Software AG, Tibco Software

Some integrations are free, but they can be more than $1,000 per month based on the volume of data moved through the integration.

File-sharing-as-a-service

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Internet-based, multitenant, and �le storage and sharing for end users. Offerings typically include access from mobile devices as well as the ability to sync and share with one or more PCs.

This technology replaces the use of traditional �le servers and collaboration solutions for backing up unstructured data (documents, photos, videos, etc.) uploaded by end users and simpli�es sharing large �les among groups of users, enterprises, and devices in cases when email, FTP, and collaboration solutions are impractical.

Amazon Web Services, Box, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace

Free for personal use; $0.15 to $0.20 per gigabyte (GB) per month for enterprise use

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Internal private clouds

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


An implementation of an infrastructure-as-a-service or PaaS-style cloud platform on customer-owned hardware. Single tenant to the company, multitenant to its internal constituents.

VM- and web-services-based modern application development and deployment.

Apprenda, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, Red Hat, VMware

$20,000 to $130,000 for a 100 VM pilot base software-only solution with commercial support. For a 1,000 VM environment, prices range from $200,000 to $1.5M. Can be signi�cantly higher based on size of the environment and when purchased with a converged infrastructure.

Public cloud platforms

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Standardized and virtualized infrastructure (compute, storage, and networking) and application platform services delivered in a pay-per-use, self-service way

Deploy web service, virtual machine (VM), or modern applications to the Internet: web-facing applications, batch, big data analytics, mobile back ends, collaboration, and suitable application test and development services.

Amazon Web Services, CenturyLink, Fujitsu, GoGrid, Google, IBM, Mendix, Microsoft, OutSystems, Oracle, Rackspace, SAP, salesforce.com, Verizon

Starting at $0.06 per CPU per hour; $0.05 per gigabyte (GB) for �le storage, plus network consumption costs as low as less than $0.01 per Gbps in and out of the cloud local area network (LAN)

Software-as-a-service

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


A user-consumable application (not middleware or an application component) delivered over the Internet that is priced on a subscription or consumption basis

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is used as an on-demand alternative to traditional application software deployed on-premises (whether on a server or on a client PC).

Google, Microsoft, NetSuite, Oracle, RightNow Technologies, salesforce.com, SAP, SuccessFactors, Workday

Between $0 and $500 per user per month depending on the application, use, and addition of supplementary modules

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Storage-as-a-service

De�nition

Usage scenario

Vendors


Internet-based, multitenant storage repository with self-service access and management

Storage for Internet or cloud-platform-deployed applications. Backup target, shared �le repository, and remote storage repository for use with an Internet caching scheme.

Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, NetApp, Rackspace, Zadara Storage

Less than $0.05 per gigabyte (GB) per month

seVeN oF 15 CaTeGoRIes aRe GRowING RaPIDly

Since our last TechRadar evaluation of this category, during 2011, many cloud computing categories have matured at a fast clip (see Figure 2). Seven of our 15 categories are now in the Growth phase of maturity, meaning adoption is strong and widespread. Only two of the services are in the Creation phase — the earliest and most risky phase of maturity.

No surprise: With widespread adoption comes maturity. Moreover, cloud services mature rapidly because they are based on singular code bases (in most cases) that vendors can freely enhance. We can see clear evidence of this pattern in Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has introduced significant new enterprise capabilities nearly every month since 2011 and increased its enterprise value through improved security and monitoring features, completion of operational audits and certifications, and creation of an enterprise sales and professional services team.

However, for every service that has matured, there are new entrants and segments still at an early stage of maturity.

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Figure 2 TechRadar™: Cloud Computing, Q4 ’14


Creation

Negative

Low

Medium

High

Survival Growth Equilibrium Decline

Bu

sin

ess

valu

e-ad

d,

adju

sted

fo

r u

nce

rtai

nty

Ecosystem phase

Time to reach next phase:Trajectory:

< 1 year

> 10 years

1 to 3 years 3 to 5 years

5 to 10 years

Signi�cant successModerate successMinimal success

Cloud billing

Cloud cost monitoring

DBaaS NoSQL

DBaaS SQL


DRaaS

DWaaS






Software-as-a-serviceStorage-as-a-service

Cloud workload management

Creation: less-standardized Cloud services Remain Immature

Cloudifying the traditional desktop and data center resources remains a challenge for customers. These services are maturing more slowly than we originally expected and require the most maturity by the end customer’s tech management teams to achieve success. As such, these cloud capabilities are still looking to cross the chasm to sustained longevity.7

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Enterprises betting on technologies in these categories risk that their chosen solution will not become standard; therefore, they should seek competitive differentiation or significant time-to-market advantages to balance the risk of having to migrate away if the solution fails to gain market traction. The Creation phase technologies in this TechRadar are (see Figure 3):

■ Data-warehouse-as-a-service is poised for fast growth. Data-warehouse-as-a-service has a much brighter future than the other Creation-phase technologies. AWS introduced a data warehouse delivered as a cloud service during 2013, quickly attracted in excess of 1,000 customers, and gave the category immediate credibility. These services are appealing because they provide an easy-to-set up aggregation point for diverse data sets, as well as scaling options that are far more economical than on-premises data warehouses.

■ Desktop-as-a-service is most applicable to small firms and departments. Desktop-as-a-service lets tech managers host desktops in the cloud at lower costs and with better management than traditional virtual desktop solutions. Hosted virtual desktops are best suited to general office workers, who can run on highly standardized Windows systems that can be cloned in a cookie-cutter fashion, not power users, who need specialized software or locally attached peripherals. Furthermore, tech managers still struggle with the issue of storing personal information and corporate intellectual property on a public multitenant service, which is a key component of desktop-as-a-service. This service can offer significant benefits to small businesses as well as firms with task-based workers who stay within one or two apps, but its applicability for the enterprise has a long way to go before larger firms will consider it a trusted and viable option.

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Figure 3 TechRadar™: Creation Phase Technologies



Multiple service providers, including established outsourcers, now offer a range of virtual desktop solutions, and vendors have updated their software licensing options to address this new class of desktop.

Negative. It is challenging for enterprises to contemplate outsourcing the platform, where most intellectual property (IP) is created. Desktop-as-a-service �ts best with small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) that may lack in-house expertise in desktop management or as a departmental solution for large enterprises and are willing to use “vanilla” services.

1 to 3 years. Before this technology can reach the next phase, we need to see continued maturation of the solutions and improved integration with in-house corporate systems, including those used for authentication/authorization, information security assurance, monitoring, and service desk/provisioning tools.

Moderate success. Hosted virtual desktops will save IT staff the time and cost of delivering commoditized computing services. In addition, they will deliver more advanced remote access and mobility capabilities than most �rms are capable of delivering internally. However, they will not have a transformative effect on �rms’ IT environment or business competitiveness until vendor services can accommodate a wider variety of enterprise requirements.

Why the Creation phase?

Business value-add, adjusted for uncertainty

Time to reach next phase

Trajectory (known or prospective)

Data-warehouse-as-a-service

Solutions are typically based on full-function on-premises database designs, but many of the leaders are uniquely architected cloud-native solutions.

Low. The key bene�ts are cost savings and time-to-market, but data resident in the cloud creates complexity and can lead to vendor lock-in.

1 to 3 years. AWS Redshift’s initial success is driving this market. As other vendors offer distinctive capabilities, including pricing innovation, we expect rapid growth for the category.

Signi�cant success. Some productivity bene�ts will be achieved as offerings mature. Data-warehouse-as-a-service offerings can eliminate database administrator (DBA) requirements, as the cloud manages the database for you.

Why the Creation phase?




survival: Five Cloud application and Infrastructure services Have Crossed over

Since 2011, a collection of cloud computing services categories have gained solid enterprise adoption, moving them into the Survival maturity phase (see Figure 4):

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■ Cloud cost monitoring introduces budgeting rigor to elastic models. These mostly SaaS services are managing the increasingly complex cloud bill. Their aim is to generate analytical reports that break down the pay-per-use consumption of myriad cloud services so they can be mapped to workloads, named developers, departments, and other strata. These tools also often map your true consumption against provisioned capacity — identifying overprovisioning, which incurs unnecessary costs — and can forecast future capacity needs using historical trending.

■ Cloud workload management helps implement the DevOps concept. A new crop of DevOps management tools have cropped up specifically to manage modern application configurations and to provision them to cloud environments. These tools typically provide a heterogenous container or scripting model to bound and describe the application and map these needs through the RESTful APIs of the given target platform. Many of these solutions are delivered as SaaS, although some can be deployed on-premises. Most are cloud-first, as opposed to traditional IT workload management tools that were built for managing on-premises deployments, and have been retrofitted to address cloud needs.

■ Database-as-a-service (NoSQL) rides the “big data” craze. In the past three years, as on-premises NoSQL options have proliferated inside enterprises, cloud providers have responded with multitenant options — and those services have gained adoption. More managed service than infrastructure element, these database services do not require database administration (DBA) skills and are designed to be readily consumed by developers. Their breadth of adoption reflects that of NoSQL in the overall market, which remains a significant but fraction of the overall database market. Solid growth and increasingly large deployments should accelerate the maturity of these solutions in the near future.

■ Disaster-recovery-as-a-service is progressing in less-demanding scenarios. Once servers have been virtualized, firms can use disaster-recovery-as-a-service solutions to replicate virtual machines (VMs) to cloud-based storage so they can restart them on the provider’s public cloud platform if internal systems fail. Some of these solutions lack the full capabilities of traditional disaster recovery (DR) solutions (such as synchronous replication), but they can be suitable for remote offices and as a gap filler when traditional DR is too costly and restoring from a periodic backup loses too much data.

■ Hosted private clouds give tech management an easy out. Many an enterprise tech management team aspires to offer the same agility, automation, and cost efficiencies that come from public clouds. But sadly, many of these organizations still lack a full understanding of what it takes to truly build, operate, and manage such an environment. With hosted private clouds, tech management doesn’t have to climb this learning curve but can instead entrust a service provider to operate and deliver this value. These solutions are configurable, dedicated, and scale with the enterprise’s overall needs. They can be colocated with the same vendor’s public cloud, traditional hosting, or other outsourcing options, enabling a hybrid architecture that suits the

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needs of different elements of the application. However, as of today, most tech management teams aren’t taking advantage of these offerings. A key challenge isn’t the technology but the culture of the tech management department, which most commonly needs to prove to itself that it can operate an internal private cloud before conceding this value proposition to an outsourcer.

Figure 4 TechRadar™: Survival Phase Technologies


Cloud cost monitoring software

As enterprises expand their use of cloud platforms, the value of these tools to guide spending and optimization becomes increasingly important.

Low. Nearly every enterprise eventually gets the shock bill for its cloud use, which triggers the need for tools of this type.

3 to 5 years. Enterprise cloud use guides the adoption of these tools. They become necessary as the corporate application footprint increases.

Moderate success. Some cost monitoring capabilities are provided by the public clouds themselves, and some traditional enterprise capacity planning and cost modeling tools may be applicable here. Others may simply not pay as close attention to the bill due to discount schedules, prearranged long-term agreements, or lack of the bill reaching a threshold for a given enterprise to see the need.

Why the Survival phase?




Cloud workload management software

While the feature sets of these solutions can be robust, including life-cycle management, version control, policy-based autoscaling, and more, they typically have limited reach across cloud platform options and depth of con�gurability within a single platform’s application services.

Low. Adoption is strongest among DevOps teams where they do not threaten preexisting tools used by IT ops. As cloud platform adoption matures, this could change.

3 to 5 years. Signi�cant portions of DevOps (development + operations) teams using cloud platforms today leverage the public provider’s own tools and APIs rather than go through these tools. Their capabilities and breadth of reach, as well as market awareness, maturity, and �nancial success will be factors in this space.

Moderate success. Application and use case suitability is high for modern applications and systems of engagement. Not so much for traditional and legacy applications.





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Figure 4 TechRadar™: Survival Phase Technologies (Cont.)


Disaster-recovery-as-a-service

DR-as-a-service solutions are still relatively new, and many of the entrants are small; however, the number of mainstream service providers is now increasing.

Low. These services have the potential to provide tremendous value-add. The pricing is transparent and subscription-based, deployment is fast and easy, oversubscription risk is minimized, and there’s less of a penalty for rehearsing. In addition, for the cost, these services provide a very good recovery time objective with limited data loss.

1 to 3 years. The majority of the current continuity automation tools in the marketplace are still immature; they either address only some aspects of the environment (for example, the virtual environment) or only have limited capabilities (such as application failure detection). Once there are more fully mature tools on the market, adoption will climb signi�cantly.

Moderate success. While continuity automation tools will be extremely bene�cial to large enterprises with complex DR environments and short recovery time objectives, DR-as-a-service will be overkill for many smaller organizations that don’t have the same recovery requirements.





Database-as-a-service (NoSQL)

Solutions are typically based on full-function on-premises database designs, but many of the leaders are uniquely architected cloud-native solutions.

Low. The key bene�ts are fast access and elastic scaling, but data resident in the cloud creates complexity and can lead to vendor lock-in.

1 to 3 years. Solutions need to mature in order to accommodate more advanced capabilities and tooling. Enterprise use is gaining but is still smaller than DBaaS SQL.

Signi�cant success. Some productivity bene�ts will be achieved as offerings mature. Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offerings can eliminate database administrator (DBA) requirements and support workloads suited to a NoSQL approach.





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Figure 4 TechRadar™: Survival Phase Technologies (Cont.)



Hosted private cloud has a reported adoption of 19% with another 8% piloting. Today its use cases are a blend of traditional hosting customers that fail to use the system as a cloud environment and public-cloud-�rst customers that are looking to extend its footprint for workloads subject to compliance requirements.

Low. Initial drivers for hosted private cloud include simpli�ed capacity planning and infrastructure procurement, reduced hosting costs from the switch to multitenant storage, disaster recovery capabilities, and a more compliant version of public cloud. Few of these implementations use hosted private cloud for its cloud-speci�c bene�ts. Today this solves some key pain points for enterprises but in terms of total business value-add today, few are leveraging it to its full ability.

1 to 3 years. Better enterprise understanding of the solutions, the value proposition, and how to adapt their internal operations and culture are required to achieve maturity and greater business value.

Moderate success. Hosted private cloud will have moderate success for enterprises since it removes barriers to outsourcing both systems of record and creating net-new systems of engagement supported with the expertise and management from cloud service providers. The ability to bridge these two worlds more rapidly than with an internal private cloud generates value and will lead to a certain level of success for hosted private environments.





Growth: These seven service Categories Form The Market’s Core

Seven technologies have reached a level of maturity that is now driving consistent, sustainable, and sometimes more than 100% annual growth rates. These service categories are clearly understood, and best practices for their use are in place, making enterprise adoption simpler and faster (see Figure 5):

■ Database-as-a-service (SQL) is growing as both an independent and bundled service. Nearly every public cloud platform offers SQL databases as an integral multitenant service today, and most of these services are also accessible as standalone elements. While many vendors in this field simply manage SQL-based databases housed in virtual infrastructure, others offer unique architected solutions that offer uninterrupted scalability, geographic sharding, and robust configuration and management tools accessible via API.

■ File-sharing-as-a-service adoption shattered expectations. This category grew far faster than we expected in our last analysis. Most file-sharing-as-a-service offerings today are aimed at individuals seeking a way to share files with multiple people or to bypass restrictive email attachment size rules and other corporate policies. Some offerings, such as those from Dropbox

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and SugarSync, offer synchronization capabilities that give users a way to access data from their various home, work, and handheld devices. Of late, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have all entered this highly competitive space, helping to drive greater maturity for enterprise needs and weaving these capabilities into larger cloud service plays.

■ Integration-as-a-service grows in concert with SaaS. Customers use cloud-based integration solutions to integrate SaaS applications with one another, connect composite elements from multiple cloud services into modern applications, and bridge cloud and on-premises applications. Customers value cloud-based integration because it is easily accessible and far easier to use than traditional integration solutions for many needs. As SaaS usage grows, cloud integration services growth will follow. These solutions are predominantly used for data integration but increasingly used for message passing and transaction processing as well.

■ Internal private clouds remake data centers as IaaS. The most popular approach to bringing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) value within the corporate data center is to build out a dedicated implementation. These user-built and configured environments normally leverage cloud platform software solutions such as OpenStack or VMware vCloud Director.8 They differ from public cloud platforms through their dedication to a single client (usually deployed on company-owned and operated infrastructure) but provide multitenant, self-service access to the company’s internal users.9

■ Public cloud platforms grew rapidly around systems of engagement. Quickly becoming the de facto deployment option for modern systems of engagement, public cloud platforms have rapidly matured and grown into a market exceeding $5 billion in 2014.10 Dominated today by infrastructure-as-a-service providers, the market comprises vendors with cloud platform service portfolios built on this base (see AWS) and vendors that provide integrated platforms that largely hide infrastructure (PaaS). However, both sets of vendors blur the boundaries between IaaS and PaaS to create more broadly applicable options for developers. In addition, a significant percentage of traditional hosting providers and managed service providers have added cloud platforms to their portfolio mix, although most are limited to the traditional IaaS value proposition.

■ Software-as-a-service is mature and expanding. No other segment of cloud services is as mature as SaaS is today; consuming software as a multitenant rented application has been with us for nearly 20 years and has now become an accepted choice for nearly all enterprises. Business leaders and CIOs are increasingly deploying these options and managing them centrally. But this doesn’t mean that SaaS is the best choice for every application category, nor does it mean that choosing SaaS is a no-brainer. SaaS is simply a proven option. We continue to see and foresee strong growth in SaaS, and it is becoming the dominant deployment choice in selected segments, including ePurchasing, human resource management, and global trade management.11

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■ Storage-as-a-service is becoming integral to cloud platforms. There’s immediate value in having a storage volume resident on the Internet where it’s easily accessible to Internet-resident applications as well as internally hosted applications that need short-term access to scalable storage. Like SQL database services (check prior bullet), most public cloud platforms offer storage-as-a-service solutions as part of the base. Standalone storage services that are not part of a greater cloud platform portfolio are becoming rare. The most common storage services expose an object-based interface most palatable to developers looking for simple, programmatic storage resources. Second most common are services exposing a file system interface. Block storage services are more commonly offered by traditional hosting companies. The most recent development has been archive-specific storage services, the most prominent being Amazon Glacier.

Figure 5 TechRadar™: Growth Phase Technologies


Database-as-a-service (SQL)

Solutions are full-function databases with relational capabilities, auto scaling, and SLAs on availability.

Medium. The key bene�t is cost savings, but data resident in the cloud creates complexity and can lead to vendor lock-in.

5 to 10 years. Solutions need to mature in order to accommodate more advanced capabilities, such as long-lived transactions. Enterprise use is gaining but is still in the 10% range.

Signi�cant success. Database-as-a-service offerings can eliminate database administrator (DBA) requirements, as the cloud manages the database for you.

Why the Growth phase?





A large number of �le sharing services target both individual consumers and enterprises and form a core part of what Forrester calls personal cloud services.

Medium. File-sharing-as-a-service has a lower cost than operating a distributed �le server environment. It is best suited to noncritical and low-security data due to the potential for leakage of sensitive information and the potential for data loss in the event the provider experiences an infrastructure failure.

1 to 3 years. Enterprises are hesitant due to security and availability concerns, but many users have been using these services to circumvent restrictive email attachment policies. Next phase of growth assumes enterprises will sign volume agreements for these services.

Signi�cant success. File-sharing-as-a-service’s success has been driven by individuals and departments. These services also deliver basic infrastructure that doesn’t deliver a lot of differentiation but that allows IT to focus on more-strategic issues. Many vendors will move upmarket into more-lucrative hosted collaboration services that include basic �le sharing.





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Figure 5 TechRadar™: Growth Phase Technologies (Cont.)



Solutions exist, with many implementations in SaaS independent software vendors (ISVs) and some enterprises.

Medium. No application is an island; integration-as-a-service connects applications to allow data sharing, trusted/systems of record relationships, and federated reporting and analysis. Much of the usage of these products is for simple scenarios.

5 to 10 years. The next maturity phase is Equilibrium, or accepted practice. To reach that stage, customers must rely more heavily on integration-as-a-service for a greater number of scenarios. Also, the products must become more sophisticated and capable of handling complex scenarios.

Signi�cant success. As SaaS adoption grows, integration-as-a-service revenues will follow in lock-step. Still to be determined is how much enterprise integration will move to cloud-only solutions and how much will employ hybrids of cloud-based and on-premises integration.






While a very considerable portion of enterprises report having a private cloud, a signi�cantly smaller percentage of these environments actually meet the formal cloud de�nition — self-service to the deployers, standardized, and fully automated deployment. Today reported adoption is at 30% but up to 94% of these adopters fall short on at least one core requirement.

Low. Not all enterprises will choose this option or fully implement these offerings to their full capability. Emerging alternatives such as hosted private clouds and virtual private cloud con�gurations of public cloud platforms may encroach on this segment.

1 to 3 years. Better enterprise understanding of the solutions, the value proposition, and how to adapt their internal operations and culture are required to achieve maturity.

Minimal success. Private clouds do not ful�ll as broad a set of enterprise needs as server virtualization. Meeting ROI with an internal private cloud environment is dif�cult.





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Software-as-a-service

SaaS, now more than 20 years old, has become an established software delivery model for certain segments of the market. Forrester has compiled evidence showing that a signi�cant proportion of enterprises and small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) have implemented SaaS for a horizontal application such as customer relationship management (CRM) or human resources (HR); similar evidence points to widespread use of SaaS for collaboration applications such as email or WebEx. Many organizations use multiple SaaS solutions. All major enterprise independent software vendors (ISVs) have SaaS offerings, and all major systems integrators (SIs) are building large SaaS practices.

Medium. Not all applications are suited to SaaS delivery, and not even all implementations of SaaS-suited software are appropriate for a SaaS delivery.

5 to 10 years. SaaS maturity varies widely across application categories, which suggests a long simmer before SaaS reaches equilibrium.

Signi�cant success. SaaS has the potential to signi�cantly reduce operational and maintenance costs for customers, has dramatically faster time-to-deployment, and can deliver richer functionality to the customer at a much faster rate. Where suitable, SaaS holds signi�cant potential for improving corporate productivity and ef�ciency.






There is strong growth in use of the platforms, and partner ecosystems are growing around them, especially the market leaders.

Medium. These services accelerate time-to-market and developer agility for new VM-based and modern applications. With static resource consumption applications and those not well architected for these platforms, it can be more expensive than traditional hosting and is not suited to many enterprises’ legacy applications due to con�guration constraints, economic model, and/or privacy concerns.

5 to 10 years. Standardization is continuing, and there is a rapidly growing stable of enterprise use cases.

Signi�cant success. Nearly every hosting company has entered the space, making it a key offering in their portfolios. The four largest enterprise vendors — IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP — all now offer cloud platforms and will help encourage their customers to adopt.





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Storage-as-a-service

Most offerings provide replication, snapshotting, DR, and autoscaling capabilities. Object, �le system, and block storage options are common and becoming widely adopted across enterprises.

Medium. Due to robust performance, scale, data protection, and con�gurable security, the solution acceptance is relatively high. And early vendor failures (EMC, Nirvanix) are fading into the history books.

1 to 3 years. Enterprises are adopting this technology, but migration away from the service may be overly dif�cult, resulting in undesirable vendor lock-in.

Signi�cant success. The services are widely used for cloud-based applications and as DR targets driving signi�cant value due to their ability to greatly reduce storage costs.





equilibrium: Cloud Billing Is addressing Its Target Market Today

Only one category has matured to the point that its market reach and, thus, growth have begun to flatten out: cloud-billing services. (see Figure 6).

Aria Systems and Zuora continue to dominate this segment, providing complete billing support systems for digital goods within mature enterprise client relationships. Some of the payment gateway and commerce platform vendors have also added cloud billing features, further cementing the category’s maturity. All can be integrated into cloud-based applications and web services through application programming interfaces (APIs). These services nearly all comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) guidelines, but buyers need to be conscious of the uneven handshake.12

In the Equilibrium stage, cloud billing has become a cutthroat business, with all the players fighting for the same value. A lot of enterprises still use legacy eCommerce solutions instead of these offerings, driving the vendors in this category to build out more B2B billing capabilities to tie into the enterprise.

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Figure 6 TechRadar™: Equilibrium Phase Technology


Cloud billing

Most solutions are 7 to 10 years old and offer full billing and subscription management support. Leaders have signi�cant adoption by enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs), and cloud service providers.

Medium. As enterprises seek �exibility from and insight into billing systems and move away from in-house apps, cloud billing becomes an interesting, inexpensive way to experiment with new billing models.

5 to 10 years. Most cloud billing offerings have full billing support and integrations with software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (e.g., NetSuite). Integrations with corporate general ledger systems are emerging and will be required to move this market to the next stage.

Moderate success. For SaaS and eCommerce, cloud billing solutions are also a potential way to unify billing across different mobile devices, across infrastructure for app stores, and for use in potential hub-and-spoke/two-tier billing models.

Why the Equilibrium phase?




Decline: No Public Cloud Categories

Public cloud technologies are too young for any category to have yet entered the Decline ecosystem phase. Only one public cloud service (billing) has reached the Equilibrium phase, which precedes Decline. Of the other 14 categories, consolidation is a more likely development than rapid progress to the Decline phase. For example, cloud cost monitoring and cloud workload management tools are likely to become standard features of cloud platforms. At that point, those categories could disappear as independent market segments.

R e c o m m e n d at i o n s

Be sTRaTeGIC aBouT wHICH seRVICes you CHoose FoR wHICH PuRPoses

This analysis looks at the maturity of several categories of public cloud computing services — not the individual solutions within each category. As such, it does not provide vendor selection guidance, and not all solutions within each category are at the same level of maturity or have the same applicability to your business. Use this analysis to determine where cloud services provide new capabilities or enhanced value you can leverage today for new applications and go-to-market efforts. After you have gained experience in this way, move to a strategic rightsourcing strategy to determine which of your in-house applications are the best-fit candidates to either move to the cloud, rearchitect as cloud-enabled, or replace with SaaS.13 During this process, evaluate the individual vendor solutions in each category rather than assume a level of maturity based on the category of the service.

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Forrester recommends the following approach:

■ Determine which cloud capabilities can best empower your business. Focus first on providing new services and capabilities or revamping existing services and processes. Determine if cloud computing provides differentiating capabilities, faster time-to-market, or better economics that will fuel the success of these efforts on business terms. Are your developers rapidly building out new web services and leveraging SOA architectures? If so, then cloud-based services may give you competitive advantage.

■ Evaluate your application portfolio for fit with cloud services. Whether or not your applications can take advantage of cloud-based services depends on a number of security, risk, application architecture, cost, licensing, and vendor support concerns.14 In addition to helping you understand which of your apps should be first-movers to cloud, this evaluation will also help you gain a better understanding of what needs to change to increase the number of second-wave apps that can move to cloud and a better understanding of the most critical capabilities to deliver in your private cloud so that you can capture as many of your apps that are nonstarters on public cloud as possible.

■ Follow application development’s lead. There’s a good chance that a pocket of your developers already have hands-on experience with cloud services. Embrace their efforts to learn what they have gained through this experience, how it can be harnessed for greater gain, and what I&O’s role can be to support these efforts. Again, focus on whether the use of these services provides business benefit. If it does, they aren’t a threat to how you do things internally; with your support, they will become an enhancement.

■ Road map your cloud adoption strategy against TechRadar growth projections. Place cloud efforts in the appropriate place on your road map and in your budget according to each technology’s maturity and expected acceleration listed in the TechRadar chart. Invest early in low-maturity technologies if you feel they can deliver competitive advantage or strategic value. If not, wait, because the ROI won’t be there. For more mature technologies, determine where you can best apply these services now.

■ Look at private cloud as a complementary service, not a defensive move . . . In most cases, you can’t. Cloud services are resident on the cloud for a reason — so they can deliver economies of scale. In many cases, you also benefit from these services being geographically dispersed. Plus, vendors delivering their services this way can update the service far more rapidly than organizations could make updates to on-premises software. For instance, platform vendors are able to add new capabilities to the environment on a continuous basis, whereas it may take you weeks to qualify and apply a patch, and your major upgrades take place only annually.

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■ . . . but keep in mind that you can deliver some cloud value yourself. Rather than attempting to match the cost of these cloud services, think about how you can deliver your services in a more cloud-like fashion.15 Where can you increase standardization of your deployment processes and enable self-service? Where can you achieve economies of scale by providing standardized services to multiple internal constituents? Don’t waste your time fighting the cloud; instead, learn from it.

suPPleMeNTal MaTeRIal

Contributors To This Research

Special thanks to Stefan Ried for his contributions to this report.

online Resource

The underlying spreadsheet that exposes all of Forrester’s analysis of each of the 15 technologies in the TechRadar (Figure 1) is available online.

Data sources used In This TechRadar

Forrester used a combination of three data sources to analyze each technology’s current ecosystem phase, business value adjusted for uncertainty, time to reach next phase, and trajectory:

■ Expert interviews. Forrester interviewed experts on each technology, including scientists in labs, academics, developers, and evangelists. Forrester interviewed a total of 11 experts.

■ Product demonstrations. The Forrester analysts who cover each of the technologies covered herein regularly request vendors to conduct demonstrations of their product’s functionality. We used findings from these product demonstrations to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities.

■ Current and prospective customer and user interviews. The Forrester analysts who cover each of the technologies covered herein interviewed current and potential customers and users for each technology to understand current and prospective uses for the technologies and their impact on the customer’s business and the user’s work.

The Forrester TechRadar Methodology

Forrester uses the TechRadar methodology to make projections for more than a decade into the future of the use of technologies in a given category. We make these predictions based on the best information available at a given point in time. Forrester intends to update its TechRadar assessments

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on a regular schedule to assess the impact of future technical innovation, changing customer and end user demand, and the emergence of new complementary organizations and business models. Here’s the detailed explanation of how the TechRadar works:

■ The x axis: We divide technology ecosystem maturity into five sequential phases. Technologies move naturally through five distinct stages: 1) creation in labs and early pilot projects; 2) survival in the market; 3) growth as adoption starts to take off; 4) equilibrium from the installed base; and 5) decline into obsolescence as other technologies take their place. Forrester placed each of the 15 cloud technologies in the appropriate phase based on the level of development of its technology ecosystem, which includes customers, end users, vendors, complementary services organizations, and evangelists.16

■ The y axis: We measure customer success with business value-add, adjusted for uncertainty. Seven factors define a technology’s business value-add: 1) evidence and feedback from implementations; 2) the investment required; 3) the potential to deliver business transformation; 4) criticality to business operations; 5) change management or integration problems; 6) network effects; and 7) market reputation. Forrester then discounts potential customer business value-add for uncertainty. If the technology and its ecosystem are at an early stage of development, we have to assume that its potential for damage and disruption is higher than that of a better-known technology.17

■ The z axis: We predict the time the technology’s ecosystem will take to reach the next phase. CIOs need to know when a technology and its supporting constellation of investors, developers, vendors, and services firms will be ready to move to the next phase; this allows them to plan not just for the next year but for the next decade. Of course, hardware moves more slowly than software because of its physical production requirements, but all technologies will fall into one of five windows for the time to reach the next technology ecosystem phase: 1) less than one year; 2) between one and three years; 3) between three and five years; 4) between five and 10 years; and 5) more than 10 years.18

■ The curves: We plot technologies along one of three possible trajectories. All technologies will broadly follow one of three paths as they progress from creation in the labs through to decline: 1) significant success and a long lifespan; 2) moderate success and a medium to long lifespan; and 3) minimal success and a medium to long lifespan. We plot each of the 15 most important technologies for cloud on one of the three trajectories to help CIOs allocate their budgets and technology research time more efficiently.19 The highest point of all three of the curves occurs in the middle of the Equilibrium phase; this is the peak of business value-add for each of the trajectories — and at this point, the adjustment for uncertainty is relatively minimal because the technology is mature and well-understood.

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■ Position on curve: Where possible, we use this to fine-tune the z axis. We represent the time a technology and its ecosystem will take to reach the next phase of ecosystem development with the five windows above. Thus, technologies with more than 10 years until they reach the next phase will appear close to the beginning of their ecosystem phase; those with less than one year will appear close to the end. However, let’s say we have two technologies that will both follow the moderate success trajectory, are both in the Survival phase, and will both take between one and three years to reach the next phase. If technology A is likely to only take 1.5 years and technology B is likely to take 2.5 years, technology A will appear further along on the curve in the Survival phase. In contrast, if technologies A and B are truly at equal positions along the x, y, and z axes, we’ll represent them side by side.

experts Interviewed For This Report

The following Forrester analysts who cover the representative technologies were interviewed for this report: Dave Bartoletti, Lauren Nelson, Rob Koplowitz, Stefan Reid, John R. Rymer, James Staten, Peter Sheldon, Henry Baltazar, Liz Herbert, Dave Johnson, and Noel Yuhanna.

eNDNoTes1 Forrester defines cloud computing as a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure)

delivered via Internet standard technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way. While the cloud market has exploded since we wrote that initial definition in 2008, its defining characteristics have remained consistent. See the March 7, 2008, “Is Cloud Computing Ready For The Enterprise?” report.

2 The following report documented the high growth rates of software-as-a-service, public cloud platforms, and public cloud business services. See the April 24, 2014, “The Public Cloud Market Is Now In Hypergrowth” report.

For years, customers have told us in surveys and interviews the top value of cloud computing is speed-to-market. For more detail about why the three main segments of cloud developers choose cloud, see the November 8, 2013, “How And Why Customers Choose Public Cloud Platforms” report.

3 In the following report and as well as other upcoming research, Forrester has found that few private (internal) clouds embrace the characteristics that make public clouds successful. Still, interest in private clouds is high. See the October 28, 2013, “Four Common Private Cloud Strategies” report.

4 Over the past year, client inquiry questions have evolved from “What is cloud?” to “What vendors should I consider?” Forrester has examined the landscape of vendors providing solutions designed to accelerate the implementation of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud in a customer’s data center. See the May 17, 2011, “Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011” report.

5 On August 18, 2014, Microsoft’s Azure service was incapacitated for over five hours due to disruptions in some of its data centers. Source: Jack Clark, “Microsoft Cloud Service Azure Experienced Global Outage,” Bloomberg, August 19, 2014 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-18/microsoft-s-cloud-computing-service-azure-experiencing-outage.html).







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6 For further details on the TechRadar™ methodology, check out the Supplemental Material section of this document and our report introducing this new type of research. See the August 1, 2007, “Introducing Forrester’s TechRadar™ Research” report.

7 Author Geoffrey A. Moore describes the gulf between creation and survival for new technologies and how companies often fail to cross over and become sustainable businesses in his book Crossing the Chasm. Source: Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm, (HarperBusiness, 2006).

8 Due to client demand, Forrester set out to create a portrait of the entire private cloud market, and not just the leaders within two of the major private cloud segments, and to provide a high-level overview of this landscape for infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals. For more information, please see the September 10, 2014, “Vendor Landscape: Private Cloud Overview” report.

9 In November 2013, we published our private cloud solutions Forrester Wave evaluation, where we used 61 criteria to evaluate 10 private cloud solutions vendors. We then took the results of that Forrester Wave report and applied them to four different scenarios commonly described to us by clients, and evaluated how well suited each vendor would be for each of those four scenarios. For more information, please see the May 8, 2014, “Applying The Forrester Wave™: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013” report.

10 Forrester projects that the public cloud market will reach $191 billion by 2020, from 2013’s total of $58 billion. This is up from our initial 2011 forecast of a $161 billion market by 2020 and reflects the intense interest from enterprises in adopting this technology. For more information, please see the April 24, 2014,

“The Public Cloud Market Is Now In Hypergrowth” report.

11 With the greater prevalence of SaaS across applications categories, technology sourcing executives must help with researching solutions, piloting and purchasing, and contract negotiations. Forrester’s SaaS TechRadar report analyzes the maturity, adoption, and potential for business value for SaaS delivery models in key categories of enterprise applications. For more information, please see the January 7, 2014,

“TechRadar™: Software-As-A-Service, Q1 2014” report.

12 At Forrester’s Security Forum 2010 in Boston, Eran Feigenbaum, director of security at Google Apps and Archie Reed, chief technologist for cloud security at HP, joined Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Chenxi Wang on stage for a keynote panel on cloud security. They explored topics such as private clouds versus public ones, cloud security standards, and emerging trends and captured the essence of the questions and answers between the audience and the panel. See the October 29, 2010, “Q&A: Demystifying Cloud Security” report.

13 Forrester recommends analyzing your application portfolio using our strategic rightsourcing methodology, which helps you determine which applications are a best fit for which types of outsourcing. Many applications are not a good fit for cloud computing environments but are legitimate candidates for outsourcing in other ways. This document provides a quick framework and introduces Forrester’s rightsourcing tool. Combined, these tools provide a simple methodology for identifying first- and second-phase candidate applications and best-fit outsourcing options for each. See the May 24, 2012, “Rightsource Your Applications For The Cloud” report.











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14 Forrester published a report that outlines a process to simplify the evaluation of application fit with cloud computing, examining the key business and technology issues that must be considered. The outcome of this process will help CIOs determine which of their applications should move to cloud soonest, and which ones should be set aside for a future date. The evaluation process can also be used to adjust your cloud capabilities road map to maximize the number of applications that can be migrated in the future. See the May 5, 2011, “Evaluating Application Fit With Cloud” report.

15 Due to concerns with the maturity or security of public cloud options, many firms have decided to try to deliver the same value on an internally operated, private infrastructure. However, most firms lack the experience and maturity to manage such an environment. To be ready, they must first scale operational standardization, automation, and virtualization mountains. You can fast-track cloud learning with turnkey solutions for greenfield environments, but delivering an internal cloud will take years for most enterprise shops. See the July 26, 2010, “You’re Not Ready For Internal Cloud” report.

16 Note that the five phases are not of any prescribed length of time. For the typical technology ecosystem profiles for each of the five phases, see Figure 3 in the introductory report. See the August 1, 2007,

“Introducing Forrester’s TechRadar™ Research” report.

17 We outline the detailed questions we ask to determine business value adjusted for uncertainty in Figure 4 of the introductory report. See the August 1, 2007, “Introducing Forrester’s TechRadar™ Research” report.

18 Forrester will include relatively few technologies that we predict will take more than 10 years to reach the next ecosystem phase. Expect to see these 10-year-plus technologies only in the Creation phase for fundamental hardware innovations and in the Equilibrium and Decline phases for hardware and software on the “great success” trajectory. We provide details on how we predict the amount of time that a given technology will take to reach the next phase of technology ecosystem evolution in the introductory report. See the August 1, 2007, “Introducing Forrester’s TechRadar™ Research” report.

19 We provide detailed information and examples of how we predict the amount of time that a technology will take to reach the next phase of ecosystem development (alternatively called “velocity” or “velocity rating”) in the introductory report. See the August 1, 2007, “Introducing Forrester’s TechRadar™ Research” report.







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Tech radar cloud computing q4 2014

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