SURVEY (pre) announcement. The state of public cloud services – the 2016 community edition

Earlier this month I published a post named ’13 reasons that might prevent companies from successfully leveraging public cloud services’. Again, this post wasn’t meant to negatively position the cloud, not at all. I just wanted to point out some possible downsides and highlight a couple of, potentially important factors that need to be taken into consideration when ‘the cloud’ comes into play. With this in mind I thought it might be useful to put together a survey specifically aimed at public cloud computing services – consider this post a warm-up.

In the past I have participated in multiple surveys myself, with the ‘Project Virtual Reality Check – State of he VDI and SBC union’ survey probably being the biggest and best known one. I really love the idea of putting together a bunch of questions, which will than be answered by dozen’s, or hundreds of likeminded IT enthusiasts all over the world (hopefully), gathering interesting and potentially valuable information. Of course some planning goes into this, but the concept on its own is dead simple, yet very effective when properly executed. Hopefully I will be able to pull of something similar, although smaller in scale.

Limited # of questions

I’m working on the content as we speak and have been for a couple of weeks now, on and off. To avoid an overkill I will limit the survey to somewhere around 30 to 35 questions max. I will include basic questions on the type of public cloud services used, the number of users involved, which provider, common migration issues, if any etc. but also questions around the future use of public cloud services like what needs to be improved going forward, what is or isn’t allowed within the walls of your own or your customers company regarding services like Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud and so on. I am also interested in what drives companies to use a public cloud service in the first place, and, of course why they didn’t use any public cloud services before, or perhaps don’t use them at all. What was, or is holding them back? And more. Hopefully these are the types of questions you are asking yourself as well.

When you take the survey you will notice that a bunch of questions have the option to select multiple answers and/or have the option to choose ‘Other’ as well. Here you will be able to react by freely typing in your own text. When I gather the results I will make sure to go through each individual submission and where possible I will group any likeminded thoughts and share them with the group, including other suggestions made.

Note that not all questions have to be answered by (or apply to) everybody, and some can be answered with a simple ‘no’ as well. Though I made sure that there are at least 15 questions that apply to all participants. As a result the final outcome will include the total number of survey participants including the number of people who answered each individual question – something like: 15 out of 25 answered this question.

Also, the survey will sart with a few general questions just to get a feel of what type of IT professionals are participating – their (your) role within the organisation, where they (you) are from geographically and so on. However, for the survey itself (answering the actual questions) it doesn’t really matter what your role is and/or if you are a self-employed contractor, work for an IT company with multiple customers or perhaps are employed by a company who have (recently) migrated to the cloud or are thinking about doing so – all input is welcome.

Anything you are wondering about?

At this time I would also like to ask you, if there is anything in particular you are wondering about regarding public cloud services that I might be able to use or put into the survey – suggestions are welcome.

I am using a public cloud service (of course) named ‘Typeform’, which is a paid for online survey service. I’m primarily focusing on the content so don’t expect any wild images and/or animations etc. However, it does offer some really handy analytic features, which will help put together a nice overview of all submissions made.

As always, thank you for reading – and sharing.

Bas van Kaam

Field CTO EMEA by day, author by night @ Nerdio

Father of three, EMEA Field CTO @ Nerdio, Author of the book Van de Basis tot aan Meester in de Cloud, Co-author of the book Project Byte-Sized and Yuthor of the book: Inside Citrix – The FlexCast Management Architecture, over 500 blog posts and multiple (ultimate) cheat sheets/e-books. Public speaker, sport enthusiast­­­­­­­­: above-average runner, 3 x burpee-mile finisher and a former semiprofessional snooker player. IT community participant and initiator of the AVD User group Community world wide.