Results from a global study carried out by VMware showed that across seven European countries (UK, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and Russia), almost a third (31%) of IT budgets will be spent on cloud computing. This figure has risen from 26% in 2010.
The survey report found that the vast majority (84%) of enterprises across Europe consider cloud computing to be a priority and more than half (56%) consider it a critical/high priority over the next 18 months.
Of the work taking place in the cloud, most are in private clouds (54%), followed by 24% in public and 22% in hybrid clouds, where enterprises leverage both private and public cloud environments. Virtualisation continues to be seen as a key technology for cloud leaders: respondents that have deployed cloud computing on a department or enterprise-wide basis are significantly more likely than all others to consider Virtualisation to be highly important as a cloud enabler (81% vs. 68%).
Despite global perceptions that cloud computing represents a more agile, flexible approach to IT, European organisations still lag behind the worldwide average of deployment of cloud management adoption by at least 10% in each case, across functions such as service-level management (42% in Europe vs. 51% globally); cost visibility and financial management (36% vs. 47%); and automated disaster recovery (30% vs. 42%). In addition, control of data and security are still a concern: 52% of European organisations say security is their number one barrier to cloud adoption.
"Cloud is no longer just about cost cutting and peripheral applications," said Joe Baguley, chief cloud technologist, VMware EMEA. "We’re seeing a significant shift in the way enterprises think about their IT infrastructures – and cloud is at the absolute heart of that. With increased adoption comes greater scrutiny and a need for tighter management, particularly when we see hybrid clouds emerging as a major model."
"Today’s enterprise faces a different set of challenges," Baguley added. "The need to bring together people, processes and technology in order to address misperceptions of the role of IT within the business will be imperative in delivering the required results and creating value for the business."
The global study was conducted in February and March 2012 amongst a total of 1,128 enterprise IT decision makers.
When asked about the benefits of cloud computing, increasing the productivity of IT was rated most highly (41%), followed by increasing business agility (36%), increasing capacity/availability (data centre, storage etc.) (35%) and reducing IT management and maintenance resources (34%).
The barriers to cloud computing were unsurprisingly led by security concerns (52%), followed by loss of control over data (41%), performance/reliability concerns (25%), and incompatible technologies (23%). All of these concerns showing that there is much to be done to convince IT leaders to move to the cloud.
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