is-2023_horizontal-white_new
October 15-16, 2025 The Wynn Las Vegas, NV More information

Philbert Shih on the measured pace of movement to cloud

  • December 7, 2015

Source: Forbes

An October 2014 study by industry association CompTIA, for example, reported that more than 90 percent of companies use some form of cloud computing. But Philbert Shih, founder and managing director of IT analyst firm, Structure Research, offers a more down-to-earth estimate.

Shih says he has watched the infrastructure services market evolve since the 1990s, when data centers became widespread. The migration to the cloud from his vantage point has been a slow, incremental process, with companies gradually moving processes such as static websites and email hosting to off-premise data centers. Shih estimates that companies have been moving about 1 percent of their workloads each year to the cloud over the past 20 years. That means about 75 percent of workloads are still running on-premise in company-owned, proprietary data centers, he said.

Back to Results