More than 8 in 10 firms intend to keep their cloud initiatives in-house, a survey by Platform Computing has found.
While experimentation with cloud computing was common among the 95 IT executives polled, 82% did not see them beginning any cloud-bursting initiatives.
Biggest benefits were expected to be access to a larger resource pool and having a more agile and flexible infrastructure. The biggest barrier to adoption was unsurprisingly security, but they were also worried about the complexity of managing the new environment and set-up costs.
James Stevenson, area vice-president for UK & Ireland at Citrix, agreed with Platform’s findings that companies are currently experimenting with private cloud initiatives rather than public cloud projects.
“We are seeing a lot of interest in enterprise clouds. The UK is a bit skeptical about cloud, yet I think the drive for the cloud is going to be the economics. Enterprise will move towards using cloud-like structures over time,” said Stevenson.
“What people worry about is data security and data can be three different stages: at rest, in process or in transit. During the at rest stage, it’s fine if it’s in a data centre, but in transit, for example, cloud bursting out to a public cloud, then some measures have to be taken. The main worry is about the in-process stage. We need solid answers for all three states and at the moment there’s only a good answer for the first two,” he added.
