VARs reap rewards as cloud hits the big time

Cloud Sherpas report claims vast majority of mid-sized businesses rely on cloud

The channel is set to cash in on the rise of cloud as the technology hits the big time and goes "mainstream" among mid-sized business, according to reseller Cloud Serpas.

According to the reseller's 2015 Cloud Enterprise Report, 70 per cent of survey participants said cloud technology is imperative to their business.

"It's been a very interesting year for us being in the channel as the big thing that we really started to see is enterprise migrations are really becoming mainstream, and I think for the longest time there was so much discussion around security that a lot of organisations were either paralysed or in deep planning stages," Cloud Sherpas' CTO David Hoff told ChannelWeb's sister site Channelnomics.

Resellers working with companies making this shift will notice a "different flavor" of needs compared with those of companies working with legacy technology, on-premise and some datacentre-related aspects of technology, Hoff added.

Companies joining the cloud trend, however, still have questions about strategy.

Cloud Sherpas' report found that just 50 per cent of executives have a detailed cloud plan.

This, Hoff said, provides "opportunity" for solution providers.

"We're now in a much more mainstream phase of organisations having had success moving a few of their workloads to say, ‘now is the time to have a cohesive plan, to have a cohesive strategy and actually execute on it'. ... They really need assistance from people who have expertise in the cloud," he explained.

The assistance needed is not just in building the cloud but also in more "tactical" aspects, such as approaching a software-defined datacentre and improving the agility of the IT department, Hoff said.

Meanwhile, solution providers looking to get ahead on the cloud trend would be wise to keep an eye on the move from software-as-a-service to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), according to Hoff.

"I think really what we're starting to see in more recent time is increased adoption of the infrastructure area of the cloud, so IaaS and all the things that go around that [such as] the migration tools themselves and the security tools themselves," he explained. "Those really require a comprehensive package for an organisation to have a successful strategy, and that's what we're seeing."