Survey: Small Businesses Adopting Cloud

Cloud computing has so far been leveraged by larger businesses who more quickly adopted this emerging technology. Now their smaller brethren are seeing the benefits. Stuart Johnston reports.

A recent survey of small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) found that nearly 40 percent of them plan to be paying for one or more cloud services within three years.

Additionally, the survey, which was funded by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), projects that the number of services they will be willing to pay for will almost double in that same time.

“The research finds that 39 percent of SMBs expect to be paying for one or more cloud services within three years, an increase of 34 percent from the current 29 percent,” the survey report said.

The survey was conducted during December 2010 by emerging technology consultancy Edge Strategies.
The researchers queried more than 3,200 SMBs with between 2 and 250 employees in 16 countries globally.

“Within three years, 43 percent of workloads will become paid cloud services,” the report said. Despite that shift, though, 28 percent of workloads will remain hosted on premises, while 29 percent will be “free or bundled” with other services.

Read the rest about cloud computing and SMBs at InternetNews.