U.S. companies are planning to spend more money on AWS native cloud services in 2017, as they realize the value of previous cloud investments, a new survey shows.
A 2nd Watch survey of more than 1,000 IT and business executives revealed that nearly half of respondents - 48 percent - will spend at least 10 percent more on AWS services this year.
Thirty-six percent of survey respondents said they are gaining their expected return on investment (ROI) from the use of cloud services, while another 30 percent said they had not yet achieved their anticipated ROI but soon would.
A top 50 MSP focused on AWS, 2nd Watch provides managed cloud services to enterprises. The company was named as a leader among Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers.
Benefits of Cloud Spending
The survey honed in on some of the specific reasons why companies plan to spend more on services like Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Dynamo DB and AWS Lambda.
Nearly one-third of respondents -- 31 percent -- cited the opportunity to increase revenue through cloud services, while 24 percent said they are motivated by the potential to decrease costs.
Better customer service (22 percent) and the desire for faster time-to-market on new products and services (20 percent) were also cited.
“The survey results are consistent with what we’re seeing and hearing from our customers,” Jeff Aden, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and strategic business development at 2nd Watch, said in a statement. “They are making new investments into these cloud-native services as payoff from previous investments show up, and they’re looking for new ways of creating value and driving down costs.”
In preparation for new cloud services, 29 percent of respondents said they are most likely to invest in databases and storage technology. Another 27 percent plan to invest in software to support new tools, while 26 will add networking gear and servers.
Cloud Transition Challenges
Although 71 percent of respondents said they are using public cloud technologies now, the challenges were not overlooked.
Thirty-four percent of those surveyed said a lack of internal technical skills is their biggest obstacle when implementing new cloud services (36 percent planned to use an outside firm for implementation).
Another 28 percent cited lack of budget as the chief impediment, while 21 percent said there isn’t enough executive support for cloud.
Seattle-based 2nd Watch, which manages about 400 enterprise workloads, conducted the online survey in March, targeting companies with at least 1,000 employees.
