Study reveals barriers to cloud adoption, though services deemed essential

Performance issues, including stability and response time, were listed as secondary concerns by the study, which polled 3,886 IT decision makers from medium to large-sized multinational technology firms based in seven countries.

With the global cloud market is forecasted to grow $177m by 2015m the IT decision makers polled identified performance as the aspect of cloud computing most needing improvement, followed by security, cost and ease of use.

As more major enterprises from a variety of market sectors adopt cloud technology, some shortcomings were highlighted: "Not all clouds are created equal," says Alcatel-Lucent's Vice President of Cloud Solutions, Dor Skuler. "A typical large enterprise supports between 250 and 750 IT applications, so before it decides to move them to the cloud it must be confident of a smooth migration.

"It needs to ensure that there are substantial efficiencies to be gained, risks to its operations are minimal, it is easy to use and that that cloud performance is guaranteed with service level agreements. Communications service providers can meet those expectations. By orchestrating and optimizing the assets within their networks and the network itself, they can meet the stringent cloud service delivery demands of consumers and businesses."

Cloud often avoided for essential business applications

Two thirds of the IT executives admitted to not using cloud services for essential business applications due to concerns over outages, while 46% of those surveys deemed service system delays unacceptable.

A reluctance to adopt cloud was found to be highest within the finance, insurance, healthcare and government sectors, arguably where performance and security are most essential. Two in five reported frequent and/or lengthy service outages.

Despite such concerns, 44% of IT departments remain optimistic that any cloud weaknesses will be resolved and services will be adopted within three years. IT decision makers in all regions are willing to pay for an upcoming higher performance cloud solution, as a carrier-grade service is four times more attractive with the potential to generate 10 times more revenue than existing service, according to Alcatel-Lucent's findings.

Middle East government organisations play catch up with cloud

IDC's Government Insights sector recently reported that a sufficient awareness of cloud is still lagging in the MEA public sector. Their own study, released last month, found a surprisingly low adoption rate resulted from a lack of nuanced understanding of cloud, and therefore low confidence in the services.

"MEA public sector agencies still need to further explore and gather distinctive proficiency in order to define their business requirements and build a cloud services model that is specifically suited to their operations," says Mukesh Chulani, IDC Government Insights' research manager for the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey.

"Security concerns constitute the greatest deterrent to cloud adoption at present. As government organizations are the key custodians of citizens' information, use of the cloud could expose them to significant risk, with potentially grave liability consequences. This is a risk factor that is greatly hampering adoption in the region."

IDC's survey of IT decision makers' attitudes towards cloud computing technology revealed the majority (85%) view cloud as an immature / developing technology, but acknowledged its potential to provide significant and tangible benefits (74%). The primary concerns surrounded cost and bandwidth, with 72% listing these as a top concern, and 68% pointing to inherent security risks as a barrier to adoption.