Almost 30 per cent of enterprises budgeting for Cloud: Connection Research

Almost 30 per cent of Australian CIOs and ICT managers responding to a study had allocated funds to deploy or at least pilot Cloud infrastructure over the next year, with 20 per cent considering it for their next budget.

Connection Research’s Insights Quarterly “Cloud in Australia” study – completed in conjunction with Fujitsu and Microsoft – gauged attitudes of 179 Australian CIOs and IT managers towards Cloud computing. The respondents came from organisations with between 100 and 5000 staff.

Almost 20 per cent of these respondents had allocated funds to develop private Cloud infrastructure with 18 per cent contemplating it for the next period. A further 36.1 per cent had allocated a budget for desktop virtualisation with 26.7 per cent considering it for the next 12 months.

Price and “pay-per-use” ranked low on the selection criteria list when CIOs were choosing a Cloud provider, despite cost savings being listed as one of the main drivers for CIOs to move to Cloud computing.

Other factors such as data security, support from the Cloud provider, privacy and the reputation of the supplier also ranked high on the list of importance. Graeme Philipson, report author and research director at Connection Research, said this was to be expected.

“What is more significant is what they do not rate so importantly,” he said in the report.

“Pay-per-use is at the bottom of the list, for example. The ability of Cloud to act as an “information utility” turned off and on at will, with metered payments for that use, is comparatively unimportant when it comes to selecting a platform, most likely because this is now seen as a “standard” Cloud feature.”

Key drivers and Cloud applications

A key driver for moving to the Cloud was the ability to lower capital expenditure on IT with 46.81 per cent rating this as either the biggest advantage or of high importance. Lowering operational costs of IT, scalability and flexibility and being able to access services over the Internet also rated highly.

By application, email and messaging was the most common Cloud platform with 5.8 per cent of respondents totally in the Cloud and 9.7 per cent had an implementation on the way. A further 22.6 per cent were some way towards moving email and messaging to the Cloud.

Cloud computing was least likely to be used for business intelligence platforms, with less than 1 per cent of respondents putting these applications totally in the Cloud.

Finally, more than half (55 per cent) believed Cloud computing was overhyped but the hype was justified while 17.4 per cent said the hype was not justified.