The use of Software as a Service (SaaS) by enterprises is becoming “mission critical”, according to a survey by IT market research company Gartner.
Gartner said that cost and agility are the main reasons for SaaS cloud adoption by enterprises, based on a survey involving four countries in four regions around the world.
Joanne Correia, a research VP at Gartner, said that the most common reasons for using SaaS were to develop and test production and mission-critical workloads.
“We’ve seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects. This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation and email,” she said.
Of those surveyed, 44 percent thought overall cost reduction was the main reason for investment in SaaS. But CIOs and senior IT project managers rated adoption not only because of cost but because of operational agility and giving their businesses an advantage over competitors.
Gartner believes that few enterprises will completely migrate to SaaS and instead will mix that with traditional on premises deployment.
Outside of the USA, many enterprises still worry about security, privacy and “fear of government snooping”.
Traditional on premise deployments will shrink from 34 percent in 2014 to 18 percent by 2017.
