Risk to cloud adoption because IT departments ‘short on time’

June 23, 2011 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Antony Savvas.

Widespread adoption of cloud computing could be threatened because IT departments do not have the time to get it off the ground, according to a report.

High maintenance costs and the increasing percentage of time that goes into administration around existing systems were the biggest challenges to overcome, said the paper.

Nearly two thirds of respondents said the volume of administrative tasks was "significantly reducing their effectiveness", and 60 percent said administration was reducing their capacity to work on new initiatives, such as cloud migrations.

IT automation software firm UC4 commissioned the survey of 100 IT decision makers at large companies. The survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne.

“IT staff are not reaping the benefits from moving to the cloud,” said Craig Beddis, regional senior vice president at UC4. “The IT department is under pressure to show it is being as efficient as possible and ‘driving innovation’, yet it is faced with a bigger admin burden than ever.

"This in turn is making teams less efficient by focusing too much of their time on mundane admin jobs that are not bringing value to the business.”

Beddis said cloud services offer the potential for businesses to be more flexible and dynamic, and that IT staff are becoming "frustrated" having to deal with an abundance of siloed systems, "which is stifling their creativity and effectiveness".  

He said this could stall the adoption of more cloud services in the future if the IT department views it as "too much of a headache".

With IT departments struggling to find time for the cloud, the scenario of other departments bypassing the IT department altogether to buy in cloud services could become more common – with security threats perhaps increasing.

Research just published has shown some firms are buying into Amazon cloud services without setting up the correct security measures.