Out-Law News 1 min. read

Businesses set to shift more applications to the cloud


Companies in Europe and the US are open to moving "business-critical applications" to the cloud, a new survey by an IT provider has found.

NTT Communications' Cloud Reality Check 2015 report (7-page / 269KB PDF) found, though, that many businesses believe moving complex apps to a cloud environment "is more trouble than it is worth". More than two fifths (41%) of the 1,580 ICT decision makers NTT surveyed during February and March this year gave that view.

The IT staff surveyed work for companies with more than 250 employees operating in a range of different industries and based in the Benelux region, France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the US.

According to the report, scalability and cost benefits were the most prominently benefits of using cloud services cited by the ICT decision makers, and they anticipate that a greater proportion of their IT budgets will be allocated to cloud solutions in 2018 compared to current levels.

However, 41% of the respondents said they find managing cloud providers "confusing and challenging" and 47% said they feel they have "less control" over their business applications when they move to the cloud. More than a third of businesses represented in the survey (38%) are not realising the potential of cloud solutions they have adopted, according to the ICT decision makers' views on the issue.

Despite the issues, NTT found that 89% of ICT decision makers "expect to migrate their most important application running on their corporate data centre to a wholly cloud environment at some point in the future". More than half of respondents (60%) anticipate the change will happen within the next two years, it said.

Businesses that have no plans to move their most important application to the cloud generally raised security, governance and compliance issues as the main reason putting them off such a move, the report said.

The survey also found that businesses find it almost as hard to develop the functionality of applications in the cloud as they do in a corporate data centre environment as they are more occupied with maintaining the existing performance of those applications in both circumstances.

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