More than half of CIOs expect to shift up to 60% of their IT portfolio to the cloud within 12 months, despite major worries over security.
Three-quarters of UK CIOs saw security as a barrier to adopting cloud computing. Performance and reliability were also key concerns revealed in a pan-European survey by research firm Portio for COLT, alongside being locked into cloud computing providers. Almost half were worried about a lack of transparency over pricing models.
But Tom Fisher, vice president of cloud computing at SuccessFactors, which numbers large firms such as Kimberley-Clark, the Telegraph and Orange among its users of talent management cloud services, thinks security is no longer such an issue.
“We’re finding people are very accepting. Probably we deal with the most sensitive data after financials, so we suspect people are getting over security. But it’s not something to be taken lightly, because if you do, something is going to bite you on the butt,” said Fisher.
Despite security worries, the message about the benefits of the cloud approach appear to have hit home. Almost half the CIO respondents cited cost reduction as the key benefit, while 21% noted the benefit of not having to own their own data centre. One in five recognised it as a way of helping companies scale up to meet business objectives.
Key drivers behind adoption included the need to access data from any location, risk mitigation and innovation. More than two-thrids (65%) said they would move between 21% to 60% of their applications to the cloud over the next year.
