To help make sense of this new landscape, IDC conducted a study of cloud adoption, both private and public cloud IaaS, in the enterprise—including costs, benefits, and challenges—for each.

Data for the study came from a global survey (Figure 7) of more than 1,000 executives at medium to large enterprises from a broad set of industries. These enterprises running applications on public or private cloud (and sometimes both) who have detailed knowledge of the cloud implementations within their organizations (Figure 8).

The results capture the current state of enterprise cloud and provided the raw material required for IDC’s analysis. This analysis took three main forms:

• General analysis. IDC considered a long list of questions around technology choices, usage, and attitudes for these enterprises and examined the results for insights into enterprises’ views on and expectations of their cloud platform solutions. General analysis includes important value drivers such as performance, security, and time to value.
• Total cost of ownership analysis. IDC specifically examined the cost structures around public and private cloud adoption and the value of the benefits they yield to build a total cost of ownership (TCO) model for enterprise cloud deployment.
• Analysis of high versus low performers. IDC grouped businesses according to a series of criteria such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and profitability into categories of overall success, from high performers at one end of the spectrum to low performers at the other—and with the bulk of businesses falling somewhere in the middle. We then examined the behaviors of companies in the various performance bands to discover which practices correlate to business success.