08 November 2012 22:59:00 AEDT 3 MIN READ

5 attention-grabbing cloud statistics

(Incredible looking cloud image credit: davedehetre licensed under Creative Commons )

Cloud technology isn’t new, but it is quickly becoming the standard and first choice for many businesses.

Here are five stats that demonstrate the rapid growth of the cloud and the benefits it delivers for businesses.

1. In 2012, the total cloud computing industry revenue in Australia will reach $1.24 billion. This represents an increase of 7.8% over 2011 revenue (source: IBIS World).

These numbers really highlight how the cloud computing industry is growing year on year. Several factors contribute to this growth in revenue: uptake of cloud computing applications by new users, both professional and personal, as well as uptake of new applications by current users.

For example, businesses already using cloud storage may add web monitoring or email cloud services.

2. Worldwide growth for the cloud computing industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 28.8% between now and 2015, with the market increasing from $46.0 billion in 2009 to $210.3 billion by 2015 (Source: Pike Research)

The growth in the Australian cloud computing industry is not unique. From these numbers, it is clear the cloud computing industry has incredible growth potential worldwide.

Factors such as low cost, low barriers to entry, improved security, and increased mobility of employees make cloud computing an appealing technology for businesses.

3. Australian businesses taking a cloud approach could lower their information and communication technologies operations by up to 25% and capital expenditures by up to 50% (Source: KPMG).

Cloud computing delivers significant cost savings over traditional hardware and software purchases.

There is no need to purchase and house physical hardware, removing the requirements to install or maintain this equipment. In addition, cloud computing has limitless scalability.

4. The cloud can also deliver improved network uptime. DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) reduced average downtime to 1 hour, compared to more than 2 hours for in-house infrastructure (Source: Aberdeen).

The report quoted here shows that the hourly cost of downtime jumped to $138,000 in February 2012, up 19% from $98,000 per hour in June 2010.

Even if your business is not in the big league where downtime is measured in six figures, DRaaS users are way ahead with downtime cut to around 1 hour, compared with 2.6 hours for networks managed in-house.

5. The average corporate email user sends and receives about 105 emails per day. Despite using traditional spam filters, roughly 19% of email received is still spam (Source: Radicati).

Managing your email filtering in the cloud means real-time protection and delivery of far cleaner email, with 99.997% of spam and 100% of viruses removed. And without spam entering your network, you’re saving on bandwidth as well.