K-12 Budgets Begin Shift Toward Cloud -- THE Journal

IT Trends | Research

K-12 Budgets Begin Shift Toward Cloud

By David Nagel
05/26/11

K-12 schools in the United States are beginning to shift their IT budgets toward cloud technologies. According to new research released today, institutions will spend more than a quarter of their IT resources on the cloud within five years.

K-12 Cloud Adoption Trends
The research, "CDW-G 2011 Cloud Computing Tracking Poll," conducted by O'Keeffe & Co. on behalf of CDW-G, found that the vast majority of K-12 institutions are using some form of cloud technology, though most don't seem to know it. In fact, only 27 percent of respondents to the survey conducted for the report identified their institutions as cloud adopters. But a full 87 percent reported that their institutions use one or more technologies that are based in the cloud, including:

Google Docs: 57 percent;
Gmail: 39 percent; and
Microsoft Office Live Meeting: 9 percent.

Thirty-one percent of K-12 institutions indicated they currently have a written plan in place for adopting cloud computing. Thirty-seven percent are currently in the "discovery phase" of cloud adoption, while 28 percent are in the planning stage, according the the research. Only 8 percent indicated outright that they are not considering adopting some form of cloud computing technology.

K-12 respondents also said that within two years, 17 percent of their IT budgets will be spent on cloud-based technologies. That figure will increase to 27 percent in five years.

At the same time, respondents said they expect to see a 15 percent savings from cloud adoption in two years and as much as 25 percent in five years. In fact, of those participants who reported adopting cloud technologies, 86 percent said that they have already successfully reduced costs by doing so. The average reported savings was 28 percent.

The research is part of CDW-G's ongoing series of tracking polls spanning a range of topics in information technology, including unified communications, operating systems, and cloud computing.

The Cloud Computing Tracking Poll surveyed organizations in March 2011 across a range of sectors, including 150 in K-12 and 150 in higher education. All participants identified themselves as IT staffers or leaders, including CIOs (11 percent), CTOs (7 percent), directors (36 percent), supervisors (34 percent), and systems engineers (12 percent). For the K-12 survey, organizations with fewer than 2,500 students represented 37 percent of respondents; 2,500 to 9,999 students 38 percent; and 10,000 students or higher 25 percent. There is a margin of error of 8 percent for sector-specific statistics and 2.7 percent for cross-sector data.

Cross-Sector Cloud Trends
Cloud adoption is making similar strides across all sectors. Large businesses and higher education are currently leading adoption at 37 percent and 34 percent, respectively. The average across all sectors was 27.75 percent. But, as with education, most respondents indicated they currently use some form of cloud technology in their operations. In fact, only 15.88 percent reported that they do not use Google, Microsoft, or other cloud-based tools.

According to the research, the most popular categories for cloud applications among adopters include:

E-mail: 50 percent;
File storage: 39 percent;
Web conferencing: 36 percent;
Online learning: 34 percent; and
Videoconferencing: 32 percent.

"Many organizations are carefully--and selectively--moving into cloud computing, as well they should, because it represents a significant shift in how computing resources are provided and managed," said David Cottingham, senior director, managed services at CDW, in a statement released today to coincide with the report. "With thoughtful planning, organizations can realize benefits that align directly with their organizational goals: consolidated IT infrastructure, reduced IT energy and capital costs, and 'anywhere' access to documents and applications."

Respondents also indicated that cloud computing will not replace all or even most of the technologies used in their organizations. Overall, respondents said 42 percent of their IT "services and applications" have even the potential to move to the cloud.

"The potential to cut costs while maintaining or even enhancing computing capabilities for end users presents a compelling case for investment in cloud computing," Cottingham added. "The fact that even current cloud users anticipate spending just a third of their IT budget on cloud computing within five years suggests that before wide-scale implementation, IT managers are taking a hard look at their IT governance, architecture, security and other prerequisites for cloud computing, in order to ensure that their implementations are successful."

Overall, 84 percent of cloud adopters reported realizing savings on application costs, with those savings averaging 21 percent annually.

The complete CDW-G 2011 Cloud Computing Tracking Poll is available free with registration. Additional details can be found on CDW-G's research portal here.

Comments

Fri, Jun 3, 2011

It's easy to do the math and calculate a simple cost. After all, you take the monthly cost of each plan and multiply it by the number of users that you assign to that plan and then total everything up. You might then tout all the savings that you can report to the CIO because you don't have to run expensive on-premises servers fully equipped with licenses and all the other costs that quickly mount up around a service. However, it's not quite as simple as replacing one big cost with a smaller monthly cost, or as the accountants say, transferring a lot of capital expenditure to ongoing operational expenses. Other costs lurk under the surface of a cloud transition. Network costs are a good example. Most companies today have networks that are designed for internal communications and that reflect the links between internal data centers and their users in offices and other company locations. But when you move to the cloud, you transform your network needs to be outward-facing because the communications are now from clients working inside the company to servers located in remote data centers that are connected by the Internet. You have to be sure that your network infrastructure can cope with the changing demand and perform as well when accessing cloud services as it does when using internally located servers. The costs of monitoring and reporting are also often overlooked. It's easy to monitor servers when they run in internal data centers and are completely under the control of the IT department. It's more difficult when you have no control over servers that are located somewhere in the cloud and that must be accessed by a resource that no one controls (the Internet). Therefore, it's important to measure and analyze performance so that you can be proactive if problems occur and so that you can hold the hosting provider accountable if it doesn't meet the service level agreement (SLA). Transition to the cloud will also add to the cost of deployment. There are many tasks involved in the planning and execution of the move, for example enabling single sign-on Every company is different when it comes to calculating a cost profile. Some will continue to have extensive on-premises services, some will operate a hybrid model, and some will use the cloud for everything. It's vital that you do sufficient up-front planning so as to understand all the cost buckets that exist for cloud services. Then, you can run an apples-to-apples comparison and fully understand where savings can be made and where new costs will be incurred. Equipped with this information, you'll make a better decision about if (or when) the time is right for your company to embrace cloud services.

Fri, May 27, 2011 TestSoup http://testsoup.com

I wonder how much money could be saved by schools going completely paperless. The problem, though, is that students would all need to own technology that would get outdated very quickly. Who would be responsible for buying that? The parents or the school?

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