Reading through the 2nd annual Cloud report from Rightscale put me in the mind of the old Dungeon and Dragons role playing game, where you gain experience points and level-up based on completed tasks. As part of the report, Rightscale has given labels to the various Cloud maturity levels for companies. Rightscale assumes that everyone is doing something with the Cloud, and there’s not a single company that is not investing at least a few business cycles evaluating the need.
The Cloud Maturity Model is as follows:
- Cloud Watchers– this is the level of the game where companies are interested in the Cloud and are seeking to start evaluating.
- Cloud Beginners– this is the game level where companies are actually working on proof-of-concepts or have started a Cloud pilot.
- Cloud Explorers– this is the part of the game where companies have already moved several applications to the Cloud and are seeking to add more.
- Cloud Focused– this is the level for the heaviest Cloud usage and the majority of the company’s assets are hosted in the Cloud.
The report goes into great detail about how each maturity level is moving along with Cloud implementations. There are some surprises along the way, but the majority of the stats are logical.
For example:
- Cloud outages have the most impact on the Cloud Focused. No duh.
- SMB is moving faster to the Cloud than the Enterprise. No duh.
- Enterprises are more interested in Hybrid Clouds. No duh.
- Security is a challenge. No duh.
There’s a lot more in the report and will probably be interesting to sift through for most of you. After a brief registration process, you can download the report in PDF format:
