Are businesses more likely to deploy communications workloads in the cloud or on premises? What percentage of IT decision-makers choose co-location as the primary deployment option for streaming media?

Do private clouds, on-premises or in the cloud hold sway for sensitive finance applications? This analysis, based on the 2015 Frost & Sullivan User Survey of US-based IT decision-makers, shows how organizations are deploying workloads across an extensive range of cloud and premises based deployment models. We look at the most common applications per deployment model. In addition, via a series of detailed charts, we provide a close look at how businesses are actually deploying common business workloads. In future editions of our annual survey, we will track the changes in how decision-makers characterize their primary model for each application, thus providing better understanding of the pace of cloud migration, as well as the ultimate composition of the enterprise hybrid cloud. This report will be useful to providers of infrastructure services, platforms, and equipment, which are interested in tracking how their customers use their infrastructure products. It will also be useful to software providers that are interested in tracking the evolution of software consumption models. 

Introduction
As the cloud market matures, businesses are no longer considering whether to utilize the cloud, but how and when. Trending data shows that businesses continue to deploy more applications and workloads into the cloud. It also shows that businesses continue to invest in their private data centers, with the intention of creating a hybrid environment. But which apps are remaining on premises? Are they there by default, or by choice? Which are being deployed in the cloud? After years of dabbling in the cloud, have businesses identified the ideal environment for each application or are they still trying out various models? Interestingly, cloud and data center service providers have little visibility into the enterprise applications being run from their facilities. Providers of infrastructure services know how much capacity their enterprise customers are using (processor, memory, and network), as well as the quantity of Virtual Machines or containers or cloud “instances” deployed on their infrastructure.

However, providers generally have no direct knowledge of the type of workload contained within. Such information would be useful to the providers. Better intelligence on the migration timeframes and patterns, as well as an understanding of which apps have found their “home” in a deployment model, would help IT infrastructure and service providers hone their services and marketing messages. In our sixth annual Frost & Sullivan cloud user survey, we set out to better understand exactly how businesses are using the various IT environments. While our past surveys have asked which apps have been deployed in the cloud, this year we got more specific, asking respondents to identify their primary environment or deployment model for common business applications. This will enable us to minimize statistical noise from “dabbling,” and to track migration over time.