Cloud-based services gain ground rapidly: but confusion still exists

The storage industry is still confused as to why cloud-based services are deployed within organizations, reveals a survey conducted at Storage Expo 2009 by Hitachi Data Systems. Despite this concern, businesses still believe that cloud technology will grow in importance for their organization in 2010.

The majority of survey respondents (79 percent) said that organizations deploy cloud-based services to save operating costs and just over half (57 percent) stated capital expenditure savings as a reason for deployment. Other reasons that respondents gave for deployment were business continuity (40 percent) and supporting business growth (32 percent).

Nonetheless, respondents are still confident that cloud-based services will impact their organizations more in the coming year. The majority of those questioned (76 percent) said that the cloud would be important to its organization in 2010. This contrasts with only 56 percent that stated it was important at the moment. When asked the same question about virtualization, 98 percent said it would be important in 2010 and 95 percent believe it to be important now.

Steve Murphy, vice president UK & Ireland, at Hitachi Data Systems expressed surprise at the survey findings, stating:

"The results show an alarming misconception around the reasons why organizations are using cloud-based services. Due to the limited information about cloud deployments to date, there is little evidence to suggest that it genuinely results in cost savings for the organization. Until present security and compliance issues with cloud storage are resolved, moving to a cloud computing model might actually be costly to an enterprise in terms of data loss or fines for non-compliance. For these reasons, it is equally surprisingly that IT workers think organizations would deploy these services to achieve business continuity and business growth."

"The cloud looks set to be a major hot topic just as virtualisation has been and continues to be. It is not surprising that organizations will be investigating cloud-based services over the coming year, due to the hype surrounding the technology. There is certainly a case for the private cloud in the enterprise but public cloud-based services still have a long way to go before becoming a viable business proposition."

•Date: 10th Nov 2009• Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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