Cloud adoption grows in Brazil as organizations prepare for tighter budgets

Summary: Everything-as-a-service becomes the norm and "public" cloud will lose space, says research.

by Angelica Mari for Brazil Tech

As Brazilian organizations brace for a possible economic slowdown and tighter budgets, cloud adoption has grown steadily in the country as an effective way to reduce spending, according to recent research.

According to a survey carried out by consulting firm Capgemini with 415 technology decision makers in public and private organizations and published by newspaper Valor Econômico, Brazilian corporates will become a lot more aggressive in advancing their cloud plans after traditionally lagging behind the United States and Europe.

Cloud market revenues in Brazil should see a jump from $328.8m in 2013 to $1.1bn by 2017, according to separate research by consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

The Capgemini study adds that 73 percent of the organizations polled in the retail, utilities, financial services, manufacturing and government sectors already utilize software-as-a-service (SaaS) and 92 percent will have a similar set-up within the next two years.

Infrastrcture-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) are also in use by 55 percent and 39 percent of all Brazilian corporates surveyed, according to the study.

A possible migration to the "private" cloud environment is another aspect of cloud adoption highlighted by the consulting firm's study: private environments should be in place at 75 percent of of those polled, whereas only 17 percent will remain using public cloud services such as Gmail and Dropbox.

However, analyst firm IDC predicts a rather different scenario, with growth rates in Brazil for public cloud services set to reach 74 percent year-on-year, with the revenues totaling $798m by 2015. According to IDC, the best seller will be SaaS, with $370m generated over the period, followed by IaaS with $362m and PaaS with $66m.