European Businesses Taking Meaningful Strides Toward Cloud Computing
Pan European research shows that enterprises are beginning to deploy virtualisation and cloud business strategies, but highlights concerns over security.
- (1888PressRelease) July 07, 2010 - Dubai, United Arab Emirates: European enterprises are beginning to embrace the business opportunities offered by virtualising assets and accessing applications through the cloud, according to new research, commissioned by Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD). The research shows that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a distributed - or cloud - computing model within the next two years. Key business drivers for doing so are to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).
The findings appear to confirm recent research by analyst firm IDC, which identified that Cloud IT services are currently worth £10.7bn globally a figure that is estimated to grow to around £27bn by 2013.
For enterprise organisations, investment in the majority of cases is in the development of a private cloud infrastructure due, in part, to concerns over security. Over a third of respondents cited security as the most significant barrier to cloud adoption, closely followed by the complexities of virtualising data centres, network infrastructure and bandwidth.
"We're in the midst of a major innovation cycle in IT-moving from infrastructure designed to automate existing processes to services-oriented architectures that speeds delivery of innovative new services," said Mr. Uli Plechschmidt, VP EMEA, Brocade. "The days when the majority of computing power was in the data center are behind us. Today, we have incredibly smart end points with lots of computing power that are remote, distributed and mobile. Information and applications are virtualized and can reside anywhere within the infrastructure we refer to as 'the cloud'. Our findings show that European adoption is on the rise, but businesses need to address a number of very real challenges to reap the benefits of the cloud."
Other key research findings include:
• More than a quarter of large organisations are planning to migrate a cloud model within the next two years; 11 percent within one year
• A quarter of organisations stated that the ability to consolidate the number of data centres was also a critical driver
• The availability of bandwidth was also a deciding factor amongst 14 percent of respondents
The research also analysed the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space, and while enterprises are embracing the cloud and the business advantages it brings, SMEs appear to be slightly slower to adopt with only 42 percent predicting a move to the cloud within the next two years; unsurprisingly 63 percent of these plan to opt for a hosted solution.
"As data centers become distributed, the network infrastructure must take on the characteristics of a data center. And if the network becomes your data center, then the network is your business. For the cloud to work, the network needs to be scalable and deliver high performance and security - without these traits any migration is doomed. What our research tells us is that companies are now recognising the profound economic implications of adopting Cloud solutions and ready to make the journey of adoption, but only if the foundation infrastructure is sound," added Mr. Plechschmidt.
The fieldwork was conducted across 200 CIOs from across Europe between March and April 2010.
About Brocade
Brocade® (Nasdaq: BRCD) develops extraordinary networking solutions that enable today's complex, data-intensive businesses to optimize information connectivity and maximize the business value of their data.
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