10 July 2012

IT directors must educate on “benefits of cloud computing”

The finding that 23% of UK CIOs and IT directors they have no plans to migrate IT to the cloud, indicates that they should be educating their board colleagues on the benefits, including cost savings and flexibility of service.

So says Neil Hedges, senior manager of Robert Half Technology, the recruitment specialist that carried out the research behind the slightly surprising figure.

Yet, according to the firm's own study, the biggest barrier to adoption of cloud technologies continues to be security (46% of respondents), followed by continuity of service (36%), data integrity (32%), speed of service (31%) and costs (30%).

That said, the survey also reveals that almost a quarter of businesses (24%) are concerned about moving to the cloud because of their lack of in-house knowledge. And that figure soars to 44% for London-based companies, although it falls to 21% for SMEs.

"The benefits of cloud computing are now well-understood, with the majority of businesses currently ... achieving cost and efficiency benefits," comments Hedges, confusingly.

"However, a smaller proportion of companies are missing out on these benefits, because of their concerns about security and continuity of service," he continues.

"It's surprising that so many heads of IT appear not to have embraced cloud technology – although this may be partly due to a lack of understanding of the benefits and how it can be applied to their organisations," he explains.

As for those with plans to migrate some IT to the cloud, the most likely functions are storage (37%), followed by whole data centres (28%), servers (27%), applications such as CRM (26%) and software development (18%).

Larger companies are more likely to migrate their data centres to the cloud (46%) than small companies (36%).

Author
Brian Tinham

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