Virtustream has announced the results of its UK research paper: ‘The Reality of Enterprise Cloud Migration in 2013’.

It claims that 69% of large organisations are planning to migrate their business-critical applications, such as ERP systems, into the cloud by the end of 2014. It says that senior IT decision makers have accepted that this migration is beneficial in terms of business agility (53%), competitiveness (42%) and productivity (40%) as well as delivering a 17% IT budget saving, on average.

The majority of large organisations (84 per cent) run an ERP system (mainly either Oracle or SAP). These enterprises also manage particularly complex IT estates with SAP users in particular running an average of 530 applications. Two in every five (38%) of these apps are legacy and not built for cloud. These SAP users are at the forefront of cloud adoption with over a quarter (27%) of legacy applications migrated to the cloud and 89% of them using cloud technology somewhere in the wider organisation.

"The end of 2014 will be a pivotal moment for the enterprise cloud," said Simon Aspinall, chief vertical markets, strategy, marketing, Virtustream. "ERP and other mission-critical applications have mainly been deployed conventionally – the cuckoos in cloud land. The next 18 months will see these critical applications pushed out of their in-house data centre nests and migrated to the cloud."

The report outlines that a number of factors have stopped senior IT decision makers crossing the cloud chasm; the top concerns included cloud security (72%), risk to the business (60%) and loss of application control (54%). A number of important technological advances such as geo-tagging data, chip-level authentication through IntelTXT, application-level SLAs and legislation have developed.

"The research shows that the large enterprise audience in the UK is a more mature one," said Aspinall. "They need to meet business demands as efficiently as possible and are looking for trusted enterprise class cloud capabilities that meet their requirements on agility, scalability, compliance and security. Performance of such business-critical applications must be guaranteed whilst maintaining cost-effective delivery mechanisms."