Businesses lining up cloud computing but not yet migrating: Survey

Over half of firms in a survey have said their top priority around cloud computing is “readiness”, rather than full migration.

IT infrastructure services firm Computacenter questioned over 200 IT decision makers at the recent Cloud Computing World Forum. The survey found that 20% of organisations have no form of virtualisation in-house, but an equal 20% have fully virtualised systems.

Overall, 51% of organisations said their overriding priority this year was making their IT infrastructure “cloud-ready”. The survey found that 28% of organisations are looking to migrate many of their workloads to the cloud this year, but a more cautious 72% were focusing on testing individual cloud functions, such as email, testing/development and hosting.

Some firms don’t have the cloud in their minds at all at the moment though, with 8% of IT decision makers admitting they are neither looking to migrate to the cloud or looking to become cloud-ready this year, the survey stated. Other priorities are taking up their budgets and mindshare, such as security, unified communications, disaster recovery and networking projects.

Andrew Vize, propositions and strategy director at Computacenter, said, “Most organisations do view cloud computing as a major focus for their business, but many corporate infrastructures are simply not ready for a full-scale switch to cloud computing.

“The majority of companies are still focused on becoming ‘cloud-ready’ and virtualising infrastructure, ensuring that systems are prepared for the cloud before making the leap,” Vize said.

Other recent research found that the majority of CIOs across Europe believed the cloud would provide their main IT operating channel by 2014.

Communications provider Colt commissioned research among 500 CIOs in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and the Benelux region, with 100 CIOs from the UK taking part.

While few businesses said they have company-wide implementations of cloud computing to date (16%), many enterprises believed the cloud will be their most significant IT operating method by 2014 (60%).