IT departments concerned about cloud capacity
June 30, 2011
Only one-in-ten IT directors believe the bandwidth at their disposal is sufficient for migrating data and applications into the cloud.
A survey of IT directors at organisations employing over 1,000 staff found that 91 percent were concerned that insufficient network bandwidth could hinder the effectiveness of some cloud services.
The survey, commissioned by system integrator Damovo and conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne, also found that nearly three quarters (74 percent) of respondents saw cloud services as a key element of their future mobile working strategy.
But with insufficient bandwidth available, many firms could see their mobile and flexible working strategies hindered.
“Cloud services can deliver greater flexibility and reduced operating costs, but these benefits can be negated if organisations have insufficient bandwidth to support them properly. This in turn can lead to reliability and latency problems,” said Glyn Owen, portfolio manager at Damovo UK.
Owen said the problem potentially affected both "vanilla" services from the public cloud to the office and homes of staff, and managed or hosted private cloud deployments.
When asked what an organisation’s biggest drivers for using cloud-based services were, cost reduction (44 percent) and flexibility (33 percent) came out on top.
Skills outsourcing (13 percent) and speed of implementation (10 percent) scored much lower, which, Damovo said, indicated that many organisations are still looking to keep the management of their mission-critical and specialist applications in-house.
This is supported in the survey with only seven percent of IT directors saying they would be willing to migrate ERP applications into the cloud, and only four percent willing to float their payroll in the same direction. Some 100 IT directors were surveyed.
This compared to the 41 percent who were comfortable in migrating email to the cloud, and 28 percent willing to migrate other basic office applications. Another 20 percent were happy to have their voice telephony hosted via the cloud.
Microsoft has this week made the cloud version of its Office productivity suite generally available to customers, as it seeks to protect its market share against the likes of Google Apps, already well established as a cloud-based office productivity alternative.
Microsoft’s new Office 365 offering includes cloud versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office.