The detractors of cloud computing benefits will state that the typical adoption is still limited at most enterprises -- they're deploying cloud services to a few early-adopters. That being said, some leading markets are confidently moving ahead with mainstream deployments, regardless of the caution. While others, such as western Europe, are apparently in transition.

The western European private cloud market will grow at a CAGR of 23.2 percent for the next five years to reach $7.9 billion in 2016, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

IDC has been looking in-depth at the private cloud marketplace -- from a hardware, software, services and networking points of view.



"The growth of private cloud is even more impressive in the context of the current economic situation," said Mette Ahorlu, research director, IDC European Services.

According to IDC's assessment, demand in the region is being driven by the need for cost savings and efficiency and with a longer perspective of creating increased flexibility, and is across the board -- from hardware, to software, to management, networking and services.

Creating a private cloud has an impact on all aspects of IT infrastructure.

Key findings from the market study include:

• Most enterprises are still in early phases of cloud adoption, typically testing out cloud and perhaps rolling out one or a few cloud services to the full range of relevant users, but not deploying cloud on a really large scale.
• There is growing interest in pre-packaged private clouds, pre-configured with servers, storage, network and management that speed up implementation and reduce need for services.
• The cloud computing approach is to become a critical part of the IT strategy for the majority of EMEA organizations in the next two to three years.
• While security, compliance and data location are barriers to public cloud they become drivers for the adoption of the private cloud.
• Partnering between technology companies and service companies is important to help create transparency in a complex market where clients think there are too many moving parts.
• Hosted private cloud is not nearly as popular as clouds on customers' premises, but hosted private cloud will grow even faster and revenue will exceed on-premises clouds by 2016.
• While the market is serviced by traditional IT providers and outsourcing companies, telecom service providers have also seen it as a great opportunity to expand their businesses.

IDC believes that managed cloud services is fundamentally a network-based offering. It's becoming an established commodity, scales to a mass market customer base, and builds on the kind of support or billing relationships that telecom service providers are capable of offering.

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