"The flexibility of cloud computing could help organizations recover
from the current global economic downturn, according to 68 percent of IT and
businesses decision makers who participated in an annual study commissioned by Savvis,"
the cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions specialist announced July 21.
Research company Vanson Bourne "surveyed more than 600 IT and business
decision makers across the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore,
revealing an underlying pressure to do more with less budget (the biggest issue
facing organizations, cited by 54 percent of respondents) and a demand for
lower-cost, more flexible IT provisioning," Savvis said.
The study indicated that "confidence in cloud [computing] continues to
grow: 96 percent of IT decision makers are as confident or more confident in
cloud computing being enterprise-ready now than they were in 2009."
Furthermore, "70 percent of IT decision makers are using or plan to be
using enterprise-class cloud [technology] within two years."
However, the survey found, "Security concerns remain a key barrier to
cloud adoption, with 52 percent of respondents who do not use cloud [computing]
citing security of sensitive data as a concern. Yet 73 percent of all
respondents want cloud providers to fully manage security or to fully manage
security while allowing configuration change requests from the client."
In addition, "a lack of access to IT capacity" was identified "as
a barrier to business progress, with 76 percent of business decision makers
reporting they have been prevented from developing or piloting projects due to
the cost or constraints within IT. For 55 percent of respondents, this remains
an issue," the survey found. Singapore
currently "is leading the shift to [the] cloud, with 76 percent of
responding organizations using cloud computing. The United
States follows with 66 percent, with the United
Kingdom at 57 percent."
"Flexibility and pay-as-you-go elasticity are driving many of our
clients toward cloud computing," said Savvis CTO
Bryan Doerr. "However, it's important, especially for our large enterprise
clients, to work with an IT provider that not only delivers cost savings, but
also tightly integrates technologies, applications and infrastructure on a
global scale."
Cloud Computing 
