Business Technology Roundtable

Around the world, market leaders in all industries have already deployed managed cloud services. Seeking to use business technology as a strategic lever to advance past their competition on multiple fronts, the senior executives at these leading companies are eager to learn about the next phase of cloud service development. Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will reach $47.4 billion in 2013 and will reach more than $107 billion by 2017, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent, that's five times the IT industry growth as a whole. As one of the key technologies enabling the industry-wide shift, cloud computing has played a crucial role in changing the way companies consume and use business technology. IDC believes that there are signs that cloud services are starting to shift into a the next phase -- where the

There once was a time when many business leaders around the world stood on the sidelines, while the early-adopters of cloud computing reaped the rewards with their first-to-market deployments. Today, managed cloud services are considered a mainstream business technology for all takers -- with only the most uninformed laggards still disputing the apparent benefits. With 90 percent of companies claiming some form of cloud usage, many organizations have moved to the next step, leveraging multiple cloud models in different combinations to optimize benefits and efficiencies, according to findings from the latest market study by CompTIA . As cloud computing becomes a default part of the business technology landscape, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes such as storage (59 percent), business continuity and disaster recovery (48 percent) and security (44 percent). “Once companies hit a stage where they are using cloud systems as a standard part of IT ar