A growing number of CIOs and IT departments are turning to the cloud to help them gain a competitive advantage for their business, reduce costs and do more with less. Nearly three-quarters of CIOs agreed that they were already using the cloud.
NTT Com Security, the company behind the global information security and risk management brand Wide Angle, published a report in which the various settings of companies across geographic area are examined in relation to the integration of cloud services.
The survey commissioned by market research company Vanson Bourne among 700+ IT decision makers at organizations of 500+ employees in the USA/Canada, UK, Germany, Nordics, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong in May and June 2013 found that North American businesses are cloud enthusiasts. More than 87 percent of North American businesses have already moved, or are looking to move their services and data into the cloud within the next two years. Asian companies come second with 68 percent, followed by 60 percent in Europe. Japan (54 percent) and the Nordics (34 percent) are the lowest early adoption of cloud services.
The researchers divided the respondents into five different categories, namely The Embracer, The Believer, The Experimenter, The Accepter and The Controller. North American organizations found to be in the embracer category with 98 percent of businesses confirmed that cloud-based operations have been part of their infrastructure for six months or longer. In Asia, the percentage is 83 percent and it was 79 percent in Europe. The US and Canada again came first in experimenter category with 59 percent of North American respondents stating they actively experiment with emerging technologies, followed by Singapore (41 percent), Japan (26 percent), Germany (21 percent) and the UK (20 percent).
The study also highlights the concerns regarding risk and safety problems, and shows how the decisions of companies affect in deciding whether to move to the cloud (private, public or hybrid) or against the cloud. The speed of global cloud adoption is based on how quickly issues such as security and cost can be reconciled. Once businesses have the right policies in place, they rapidly expand the services and applications delivered via the cloud, says the report.
Half of Embracers say that cost or security is most important when deploying new applications. US and Canadian organizations look for cost (63 percent) when deploying new services or changing the delivery of existing services, followed by business agility and flexibility (52 percent), availability of in-house skills (47 percent), competitiveness (39 percent) and client retention (38 percent). Cost reduction is also the main criteria for other regions (50 percent in Europe and 54 percent in Asia) followed by availability of skills (27 percent in Europe, 20 percent in Asia) and finally speed-to-market (26 percent in Asia and 22 percent of European organizations).
The report further states that what’s interesting is that it’s possible to see attributes of different cloud personas in each country, even though they were defined globally, with the USA falling into both the Embracer and Believer personas. But whatever stage businesses are at, cloud is recognized as playing an increasingly important role as companies seek to move into new territories and be competitive on the global stage.
