Cloud computing is coming of age in large enterprises with the birth of "cloud thinking" finally arriving, according to a new study of North American and European IT professionals conducted on behalf of CA Technologies. The study suggested that more enterprises are actually now active in the cloud and their virtualization efforts are contributing to broader the interest in cloud computing.
The results indicate a shift toward accelerating the uses of cloud computing and helping to align IT decision makers and implementers around common goals of efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. CA says that collaboration tools lead cloud deployments at 75 percent, with hosted email, antivirus/spam filters, and web conferencing noted as the most common applications being deployed in the cloud by large enterprises.
Infrastructure and development platforms in the cloud (Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service) appear to be poised for growth with 58 percent of large organizations already using these services, and 43 percent considering them. Such use and consideration sets up infrastructure clouds as the next wave of cloud adoption.
"This study confirms that large enterprises are exploring the benefits of the cloud, and are looking to expand from basic services like collaboration to more complex Infrastructure and Platform cloud services," said Adam Famularo, general manager, Cloud Computing Business, CA Technologies. "It validates a trend we predicted, that IT executives are rapidly becoming orchestrators of an IT supply chain made up of internal and external services. With this shift comes a growing need for sophisticated management and security, allowing enterprises to change how they think about IT to reap the full rewards that cloud computing offers — agility, efficiency, and scalability."
The concept of the cloud is still an uncertainty for many companies. Looking again at the survey: Executives are primarily concerned about security (68 percent) and poor service quality (40 percent), while roughly half of all respondents consider risk of job loss and loss of control as top deterrents.
