The cloud services market remains relatively immature but is forecast to grow significantly within the next five years in terms of both subscriber numbers and value. Enterprise IT departments have, to date, moved a limited number of specific applications, most commonly web applications, office suites, and CRM/ERP applications offered under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, out of their own data centres and server farms and into external cloud hosted environments.

But persistent concerns around the security, reliability, performance and management of cloud services means that the majority of physical and virtualised workloads remain anchored within on-premises infrastructure. Cloud-based security, backup and disaster recovery applications remain relatively underused by enterprise IT departments, for example, as do Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS) platforms offering basic storage and CPU batch processing.