A Forrester Consulting

Thought Leadership Paper

Commissioned By Akamai

Cloud Is Paying Off For

Enterprises
. . . To Get High Returns You Need To
Know Key Success Drivers

June 2014

Table Of Contents
Executive Summary ........................................................................................... 1
The Public Cloud Is Approaching Enterprises Main Street ..................... 2
But Satisfaction Comes Best Through Proper Understanding ................... 3
Hybrid Comes With A Discrete Array Of Concerns And Challenges .......... 4
Key Recommendations ..................................................................................... 8
Appendix A: Methodology ................................................................................ 9
Appendix B: Endnotes ....................................................................................... 9

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Executive Summary
Cloud adoption is accelerating, as corporate users report
they are achieving the benefits from the cloud that they
expected. Satisfaction with cloud services is widespread
thanks to growing maturity, greater understanding of what
makes them different, and their cost and elasticity benefits.
However, these general satisfaction levels appear to be
moderate, not high. Whats missing? Those that are fully
satisfied and maximizing the business impact of cloud
initiatives understand in greater depth how various cloud
services differ, how best to use them, and what changes
clouds require of their applications and configurations. They
are also using multiple cloud services in combination to
achieve their business aims. Rare is the highly satisfied
customer who is purely using just one cloud service.
Organizations that leverage hybrid as well as a mix of cloud
services that bring differentiated and complementary value
are more likely to be highly satisfied.
In March 2014, Akamai commissioned Forrester Consulting
to evaluate cloud adoption and satisfaction. Forrester
examined expected and realized benefits, along with the
concerns and challenges of implementing public cloud
across global enterprises.
Organizations that leverage hybrid as well as a
mix of cloud services that bring differentiated
and complementary value are more likely to be
highly satisfied.
In conducting in-depth surveys with 261 IT and business
decision-makers with software oversight at enterprises in
the US, UK, Germany, India, and Japan, Forrester found
that these companies achieved benefits such as economies
of scale, risk mitigation, and autonomy for the IT
organization.
KEY FINDINGS
Forresters study yielded three key findings:

Public cloud use is increasing across a number of

business-critical use cases. The idea that cloud
services are only good for applications with low service
level agreements (SLAs) applications and noncritical
activities, like test and development, was disproven in this
study of experienced cloud users. In fact, our study found
that the more critical the application, the higher the

satisfaction. Why? We can attribute this partly to the

maturity of the cloud services, but its also because the
higher the criticality, the more effort a company makes to
ensure its success.

Cloud success comes from mastering The Uneven

Handshake. Cloud services offer highly standardized
and automated capabilities, but often these capabilities
fall short of the specific needs of your company. When
this happens, it doesnt mean you cant use them, but that
you have to close the gap between the service offering
and your needs. This gap, what Forrester calls The
Uneven Handshake, is filled through supplementation of
additional cloud-based services that are critical to the
overall cloud solutions stack. This means using multiple
cloud services in coordination to deliver the service levels
needed, and adjusting applications to fit the cloud
platform and portfolio of necessary cloud services.
Its a hybrid world. Modern applications are not a single
executable running in one place, but a mix of applications
and services some on-premises, some in the cloud
that are increasingly not just on one cloud, but on a
multitude of platforms and services. There are clear
benefits from implementing a multicloud approach, such
as economies of scope, risk mitigation, and autonomy for
the IT organization. However, there are also several
discrete challenges and concerns. Performance concerns
include bandwidth challenges, inconsistent performance,
and slow application response time. Top concerns about
availability include connectivity challenges and lack of
visibility into infrastructure availability. Finally, security is,
of course, always present in cloud conversations and
encompasses data, application, regulatory, and physical
data center worries.

The Public Cloud Is Approaching

Enterprises Main Street
Are the claims that cloud computing can save you money,
make you more productive, and accelerate business value
true? When you survey actual cloud users, as we did in this
study of enterprise business and IT leaders, the answer is a
clear yes. This study found that among those companies
leveraging cloud computing services, they were meeting
their business objectives and spreading cloud use across
the company. Our study found:

Business-critical workloads are moving to the cloud.

The adage that cloud services are only for test and
development and noncritical workloads proved to be
untrue among our survey respondents. The majority said
that their highest satisfaction with cloud services came
with business-critical applications (see Figure 1).
Satisfaction with the cloud for business-critical
applications was nearly universal, reported by 85% of
respondents (see Figure 2).

Confidence is soaring. Over 50% of respondents

reported extreme satisfaction. Even those with less than
two years of experience using or managing cloud services
were highly satisfied. Just over half of the business users
with less than two years of experience were extremely
satisfied, while 42% of IT leaders with more than two
years of experience reported similarly high satisfaction.

Use is increasing across a number of use cases. Use

of cloud across a wide variety of categories is high and
rising. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings lead cloud
adoption and are being found in nearly all application
categories. But cloud platforms are also widely being
used for a variety of applications, including some
previously thought verboten.

FIGURE 1
Satisfaction With Cloud-Based Services Is High Across Application Categories

For the following types of cloud applications, please indicate your level of satisfaction.
(Experienced [> 1 year])
5 Extremely
satised

4 Somewhat
satised

3 Neutral

2 Somewhat
dissatised

Email services

51%

Websites or web applications

46%

Business intelligence/big data

1 Extremely
dissatised
1%
37%
9%
2%
2%
41% 7%
2%

45%

41% 6% 4%

Customer relationship management (CRM)

43%

40%

Mobile or mobile web back-end apps

43%

40%

Disaster recovery and backup services

40%

Product life-cycle management

40%

Rich Internet applications (RIAs)

39%

Content/collaboration sites/portals

35%

eLearning

Human resources

33%

Base: 161 IT and business decision-makers with > 1 year experience in enterprise software oversight
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Akamai, March 2014

9% 4% 2%
11% 4% 2%

43%

11% 4% 1%

50% 6% 6% 1%
45%
49%

32%
27%

12% 4%
3%
10%
2%

42%

37%

Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

Supply chain

45%

4%

52%
50%

13% 4% 2%
8% 4%

3%

10% 4% 1%
15% 5% 1%

FIGURE 2
Satisfied With Cloud Services for Critical Apps?
Clearly Yes
What is your level of satisfaction with your IaaS
public cloud service today for critical applications?
(most important, revenue generating, tight
SLA applications)
5 - Extremely
satised

Business Experienced (n=80)

1 - Extremely
dissatised
4%

65%

28%

2%
3%

Business Inexperienced (n=35)

IT - Experienced
(n=81)
IT - Inexperienced
(n=65)

51%

42%

49%

34% 9%

3%

49% 7% 3%

42% 8% 2%

Base: 261 IT and business decision-makers with enterprise software

oversight
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on
behalf of Akamai, March 2014

Cloud benefits are real. Satisfaction was reported for

cloud performance, agility benefits, security, and cost
advantages as well. Respondents also reported high
satisfaction with return on investment (ROI), achieving
required service levels, and user experience satisfaction.
The lowest reported satisfaction level was for time-tomarket, which was cited as satisfactory by only 80% of
the respondents.

But Satisfaction Comes Best

Through Proper Understanding
While the cloud story certainly looks rosy in these findings,
this satisfaction doesnt come blindly. Note that about half
the satisfaction being reported is only somewhat. To
achieve high satisfaction, enterprises have to bring a strong
understanding about what cloud services are best used for
and how best to leverage them. Those companies reporting
the highest satisfaction know that:

Its a hybrid world. Cloud success doesnt come from

moving everything to the cloud, nor does it come from
moving just about anything. It comes from knowing which
applications are most appropriate for the cloud and taking
a hybrid portfolio approach.

Cloud success isnt single-vendor. High satisfaction

also comes from understanding that not all cloud services
or vendors are equal and that certain clouds are better for
certain applications and use cases. This means
leveraging a mix of cloud services and vendors that are
most appropriate and suited to your needs.
Architecture matters. Success also comes from
understanding how cloud services and platforms differ
from traditional on-premises IT solutions. Clouds deliver
standardized resources and capabilities that favor modern
applications that scale out and are composed of multiple
small instances and services, rather than single large
executables that are tightly coupled to the underlying
hardware. Thus, the most success comes from
organizations that design for the cloud and optimize their
configurations around these parameters.
User experience matters most. A lot of cloud observers
assume clouds are everywhere at once and that
applications in the cloud inherently give you good
performance no matter where the user lives. Those
reporting the highest satisfaction with clouds know this
isnt true and that cloud services all originate from
physical data centers that suffer the same speed-of-light
latency issues that traditional data centers face. They
therefore supplement the clouds with solutions that
address Internet bottlenecks and last mile problems. This
helps them deliver performance consistently to their target
geographies, load balance within and across cloud
providers (and their existing data centers), and
consistently defend against attacks targeting applications,
data, and cloud infrastructure.
A multicloud approach delivers the greatest benefits.
No one cloud platform or service can meet all your
business needs. And the enterprises showing the highest
degrees of satisfaction reported using multiple cloud
services. The value comes in understanding which are
best for what purpose and how they can best be used in
combination. Some cloud services are better suited to
certain applications based on the services they provide
that support that application type (such as providing a
mobile back end as a service for smartphone apps). Also,
the greatest success is achieved by customers who are
able to successfully supplement core cloud-based
compute and storage resources with additional cloudbased services that are critical to the overall cloud
solutions stack, such as security, load balancing, and
performance optimization.

Hybrid Comes With A Discrete Array

Of Concerns And Challenges
Given that your cloud portfolio wont be a single bet on one
cloud service, its important to understand the areas in
which IT needs to focus its hybrid efforts. These areas
support the concept of The Uneven Handshake of cloud
1
computing (see Figure 3). The Uneven Handshake is the
recognition that cloud services, being highly standardized
and automated capabilities, are designed to deliver a fixed
service with a set service level to all customers in exactly
the same way.
So if you need to achieve higher SLAs, better performance,
and/or a unique configuration or security, this is your
responsibility. Combining and supplementing cloud services
to achieve your business objectives is how you move from
somewhat satisfied with cloud to extremely satisfied (see
Figure 4). The key areas to focus on are:

FIGURE 3
The Uneven Handshake Of Cloud Computing

Source: AWS Cloud Security, Forrester Research, Inc., February 5, 2014

Ensuring cloud use meets your security and

compliance requirements. Yes, it is possible to meet
your companys unique security requirements when
leveraging cloud services. But you need to understand
where the given cloud providers handshake stops and
take the appropriate actions to fill the gaps from there.
Key security areas to investigate include:
1. Extend your enterprise perimeter around your
cloud. Cloud services are equally at risk from
Internet security threats, including distributed denial
of service (DDoS) attacks, SQL injection, and crosssite scripting all of which can bring a service to its
knees or, worse still, compromise sensitive customer
data. Content delivery network (CDN) providers
typically offer services that are complementary to
and easily integrated with a cloud providers
infrastructure in order to provide configurable first
levels of defense against these threats, freeing up
your valuable back-end resources to serve real
customers.

FIGURE 4
Meeting Expectations
How well did your chosen cloud service actually meet these key metrics?
5 Meet/met
very well

4 Somewhat
well

3 Neutral

2 Somewhat
meet/met

Business improvement

57%

Business agility

45%

Cloud application availability SLA

45%

Content delivery/distribution

43%

Data security

43%

ROI

12% 1%
1%
44% 8% 1%

44%

10% 1%

45% 5% 5%
46%
45%

42%
40%

1%

37%

46%

End user performance SLA

3% 2%
2%

39% 7%

49%

Global access requirements

Cloud application performance SLA

Revenue generation from this application or
deployed service
Cost savings
User experience/end customer
satisfaction/adoption
Time-to-market

36%

53%

Application regulatory compliance

Ease of scalability

1 Not well

8%

3%

9%

3%

47% 7% 4%
44%

10% 6%
2%
48%
9%
1%

39%
38%

48%

10%

38%

48%

9% 4% 2%

37%

3%

52% 6% 5%

36%

44%

17%

3%

Base: 261 IT and business decision-makers with enterprise software oversight

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Akamai, March 2014

2. Verify application security. The most common

breaches that have occurred in the cloud have not
been the fault of the cloud vendors but errors made
by the customer. Designing an application and
leaving share all or port 80 open to the public
Internet might not be a big deal when the application
is in your data center behind the firewall, but on the
public cloud, this can spell disaster. Get familiar with
the tools and cloud-based security services that let
you monitor and enforce application security and can
help guide you to application architectures and lifecycle practices to ensure this security.
3. Pass regulatory compliance in the cloud. This
can be possible, but the cloud vendor itself wont get
you there. It is becoming increasingly common to
find cloud services that carry compliance
certifications from the payment card industry,
healthcare associations, and other industries that
define compliance rules and laws. These
certifications, however, only cover the compliance of

the service the cloud provider gives to you not

how you use the service. This part of The Uneven
Handshake remains your responsibility. The value
in using a compliant cloud comes in knowing that for
the service, its operations, and how its data centers
are operated, you have assurances and can focus
your efforts on your application and data.
4. Know that physical security is usually covered
by the cloud provider. But not always. Cloud
providers that have certifications or self-audits (look
for an SSAE-16 Type II audit) are required to
document their physical data center security
practices. Its your responsibility to read this
information and ensure it meets the needs of your
company. Some customers with highly sensitive
data may only want to use cloud services that
employ data center operators who are citizens of
your country. If that isnt the case with a given cloud
provider, you need to ensure your data stays within

country boundaries, and that usually means

supplementation.

visibility is one of the top concerns when it comes to

availability in a public IaaS cloud environment (see
Figure 5). This is where SaaS-based monitoring
solutions and app-level and end user monitoring can
make all the difference. As we move applications
onto services that manage the infrastructure, our
incumbent practices lose value and the need to
manage the actual service and customer
experiences rises, as availability isnt judged by the
server that went down, but by the user experience
getting slow.

5. Fear the agile unknown. If you have been tracking

the security news feeds of late, you have a good
sense of how quickly and creatively hackers are
moving. The evolution of cyberthreats is
accelerating, making it increasingly difficult for
corporate security departments to keep up. This is
where supplemental cloud services can really help,
as their security teams serve as supplements to your
own team, and their security solutions continuously
evolve to stay ahead of the changing threat
landscape. But all services are vulnerable, so it
behooves you to layer security services that focus on
different vulnerabilities and give you greater visibility
across services.

3. We must monitor connectivity between

machines. Cloud apps dont live on an island, but
they are usually spread throughout the cloud data
center, across multiple data centers, and then linked
back to your facility. Monitoring these connections is
key to ensuring availability.

Avoiding outages. The days are gone in which your

application was a single executable that you could point to
in the data center and easily ensure its availability.
Todays modern applications are a mix of several
components that together build a process that the
customer experiences as a service. This means
availability comes through collective assurance. To do this
in the cloud means understanding the following points:
1. Fact: All infrastructure fails. Theres no getting
around it. This is why we deploy redundant
instances of our applications to get greater
availability. And in the cloud, the best practice is to
deploy redundant instances across fault zones and
geographies so we avoid outages at these levels as
well. And in the largest cloud services, failure of
individual infrastructure components (servers,
storage arrays, drives, etc.) are typically higher
because they deploy low-cost, commodity
components. Rather than expect the server to
deliver high availability, we rely on the application
and virtual infrastructure to assure this. That means
its important to build applications that handle this
model and monitor these applications, along with
augmenting applications with real-time load
balancing and failover between application
environments.
2. But we often lack visibility into availability. If you
are like most IT operations teams, you monitor the
infrastructure but rarely the application, and even
more rarely the third-party services on which the
modern apps rely. Our survey found that lack of

FIGURE 5
Availability Worries Mirror Those Of Performance
Specically, what are your concerns around
availability in a public IaaS cloud environment?
Vulnerability to
cyberattacks
Lack of visibility into
cyberattacks
Connectivity between
machines
Infrastructure
availability
Lack of visibility
into availability
High failure rates of existing
VMs already provisioned
None we dont have
any concerns

38%
36%
33%
30%
29%
27%

16%

Base: 261 IT and business decision-makers with enterprise software

oversight
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on
behalf of Akamai, March 2014

Understanding that performance is in the eye of the

beholder (see Figure 6). Todays user (e.g., consumer,
buyer, employee, partner, etc.) is highly impatient. If your
service or mobile application makes users wait as data
loads from a distant server or is undergoing a restart due
to an infrastructure failure, users may take action that
negatively affects your business, such as moving to your
competitor or reverting to costly manual business
2
processes, before you can address the issue. This puts

even greater focus on defining performance at the end

3
user/customer and looking backward from there. To do
this, focus on these problem areas:
1. Bandwidth challenges. The skinniest pipe is the
one you have the least control over. If a users 4G
connection falls back to 2G, they may blame the
network, but they will more likely blame your
application. This is where caching content and
pushing the end user interactivity to as close to the
user as possible pays the biggest dividends. And
while you may think the cloud is everywhere, it isnt.
Every cloud service comes out of a small set of data
centers that have clear geographic locations. If your
users are distant from your cloud provider, they will
feel latency you have to address.
2. Consistency equals quality. Users will define the
quality of their experience not by how fast your logo
loads, but by how consistently you conduct the entire
user experience. This means they will have low
tolerance for performance variation due to high
usage, geography, time of day variances, or how
busy and crowded your public cloud provider
happens to be at the time. Supplement your
application deployment (and monitor this
architecture) with application delivery services to
ensure consistent experiences.
3. Slow application response time. Remember that
the configuration, supplementation, and caching
approaches still cant overcome a poorly designed
application. This is where a partnership with
development is critical to operations and
performance assurance. An application designed to
assume the fast pipes inside your data center may
not run so well when moved up to the public cloud
without some recoding and reconfiguration.
4. Lost in transit. You might have a well-designed
application, fast pipes, good caching, application
delivery services, solid monitoring, and the proper
geographic reach and still have performance
challenges. The likely culprit in this case is packet
movement and retry. In a complex transactionoriented application, packets (and even bits) may get
lost or fail to transfer fully through the system. In
these cases, retries are inevitable and slow down the
customer experience. These errors can be caused
by multiple sources such as geographic events,
sunspots, cyberattacks, or a multitude of other
issues. This is why end-to-end application-level

monitoring is crucial, and having as many points in

the system where the issue can be isolated and
addressed will shorten the fix cycle. It also prevents
packet losses from cascading through the system
and making root-cause identification difficult.

FIGURE 6
Performance Concerns
Specically, what are your concerns around cloud
performance in a public IaaS cloud environment?
Lack of visibility into
cyberattacks

28%

Bandwidth challenges

27%

Vulnerability to
cyberattacks
Consistency

26%
22%

Application response
time is slow

21%

Packet loss

21%

Lack of visibility into

performance

21%

Base: 261 IT and business decision-makers with enterprise software

oversight
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on
behalf of Akamai, March 2014

Key Recommendations
While the straight-up consumption of cloud services may meet your business and IT objectives somewhat, addressing
cloud platform shortcomings (AKA The Uneven Handshake) will not only ensure success, but also increase the overall
impact on the business. Organizations that are achieving the highest efficiency, biggest gains, and competitive advantage
bring multiple cloud services together to orchestrate solutions that deliver outsized gains. The ways to get started down
this winning path are:

Drive more aggressively to the cloud. The latest Forrester Forrsights surveys show that nearly 50% of business-unitaligned developers are already building or will build applications in the cloud by the end of 2014. And 31% of corporate IT
4
ops teams plan to add public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to their official portfolio in the coming year. The cloud
is not only a viable option for a broad range of workloads but has quickly become the preferred option for reaching new
markets and buyers faster and staying ahead of the competition. Its time for IT leaders to ask themselves who will deliver
the cloud the business wants and rise to the challenge.
Think beyond cloud platforms. While much of the hype around cloud computing centers on IaaS platforms, they are just
a core building block to a successful cloud implementation. Organizations must know and address blind spots across
multiple clouds and data centers. This means understanding The Uneven Handshakeand identifying the gaps in SLAs,
security, performance, availability, and end user experience that cloud platforms alone cannot meet, then filling these gaps
with complementary services.
Know that one size does not fit all when it comes to building cloud architecture. While its clear that applications that
scale out fit well on cloud platforms, there are a wide variety of additional parameters and approaches that can win in the
cloud. The winning approach we see from enterprises comes through an understanding that not all cloud services are the
same but that many can be used in complement with each other to achieve certain aims. Clients will undoubtedly have
multiple SaaS applications; security, backup, monitoring, application delivery services, management, and content delivery
networks in their cloud portfolio. Mixing and matching the platforms, tools, and services to give you the greatest
productivity, competitive advantage, and user experience is the winning formula.
Use heterogeneous deployment and management tools to help you manage the mix. While cloud-specific tools may
give you clear access to capabilities and functions that are unique to that platform, your foundational approach should be
through tools that drive consistency in how you configure, deploy, and manage applications across platforms. While these
tools may not cover 100 percent of the features and services of every platform, they can help ensure good repetitive
practices that are common across cloud services. And consistency is necessary for standardization and automation, which
will drive up the quality and availability of the services you build. Eliminating human error from out-of-process actions is key
5
to how the clouds themselves drive greater reliability.
Value-add cloud services that give multicloud advantage. Just as heterogeneous management tools can drive
consistency of process, using platform-independent cloud services that complement and enhance these platforms deliver
the same type of benefit. Services that offer independent security, caching, web performance acceleration, CDNs, identity
federation, and other common services give you greater control and ultimately choice. While it may be easier in some
cases to use the cloud platform- or SaaS-specific services for these common functions, if theyre available, doing so can
lock you into these offerings or make migration more challenging.

At the end of the day, cloud services should be viewed as yet another set of tools in your IT toolbox. Along with your data
center, traditional hosting, and outsourcing portfolios, cloud brings additional capabilities and offerings your company can
use to build better user experiences and more efficient processes. The broader your toolkit, the more options you have to
leverage. Dont be the builder who only has a hammer and treats every business problem like a nail when a full tool belt of
services is available today to help you work more productively and efficiently.

Appendix A: Methodology
In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 261 IT and business decision-makers at enterprises in the US, UK,
Germany, India, and Japan to evaluate cloud services. Survey participants included managers and above with software
oversight. Questions provided to the participants asked about adoption, benefits, challenges, and trends. The study was
completed in March 2014.

Appendix B: Endnotes
1

Source: Cloud Management In A Hybrid Cloud World, Forrester Research, Inc., July 30, 2013.

Source: The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2014, Forrester Research, Inc., March 27, 2014.

Source: Best Practices: Attaining And Maintaining Blazing Fast Web Site Performance, Forrester Research, Inc.,
February 4, 2009.
4

Source: Forrsights Developer Survey, Q1 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. and Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2013,
Forrester Research, Inc.
5

Source: Five Data Center And IT Infrastructure Lessons From The Cloud Giants, Forrester Research, Inc., August 15,
2013.