CIOs frustrated by ‘fake’ cloud services

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There is widespread dissatisfaction among CIOs about being offered "fake" cloud services.
 
Research among 200 CIOs shows that 83% are frustrated with having to cut through marketing hype to find out which solutions are genuine cloud offerings and which are merely conventional hosting services with the word "cloud" added to the title.

Such "cloud washing" was covered in a report from analyst Forrester this June,

Over two thirds (67%) of respondents in the CIO survey had been offered "cloud" services that are fixed term, 40% had been offered services that were not elastic or scalable, and 32% had found that in many cases services were not even self-service.

According to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology cloud services should be on-demand and self-service, scalable/elastic and pay-as-you-go.
The survey also found that despite the availability of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, which allow companies to pay by consumption, many are still paying for server capacity they are not using.
 
The research, conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of cloud hosting provider ElasticHosts, found businesses are using less than half (49%) of their on-premise server capacity at any given time.
 
Richard Davies, CEO for ElasticHosts, said, "The research shows there are many cloud providers that are providing traditional IT services and rebadging them as ‘cloud ‘, even though they fail to meet widely accepted criteria.
 
"It is disappointing to see providers out there that are hindering the growth of the market by frustrating end-users and offering solutions that are not meeting expectations."

IDG News Service

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