IT departments control 80% of business spend on cloud computing as 65% of enterprises adopt it as a platform.

CIOs and CTOs are now personally responsible for 62% of cloud purchases, said Verizon’s State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014 report, the telecom firm’s ‘s annual look at the adoption of cloud technology in enterprises.

The figures contrast recent trends that suggest IT budgets are being controlled mainly by the business, with marketing heads and others bypassing the CIO to purchase the technology they want to deploy.

In fact, 71% of 988 respondents told 451 Research, which carried out the survey, that IT was primarily responsible for cloud spend, while 38% said line of business assumed responsibility during the planning stage.

Meanwhile, enterprise cloud spend has increased 38% on last year, and more than two-thirds of firms are using cloud to run customer-facing, mission-critical applications – an increase of 11% on last year.

"When it comes to enterprise IT and cloud computing, the discussion has decidedly shifted from ‘if’ to ‘how’ and ‘what,’" said Siki Giunta, senior VP of cloud services for Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

"Customers are now coming to us with more detailed, stringent requirements and questions about where and how to use cloud to transform their businesses and mission-critical workloads, instead of whether or not to use it."

Meanwhile, 78% of companies expect to put more than half their workloads in the cloud by 2017, up from 58% at the moment.

Migrating

But Verizon warned that migrating on-premise applications to the cloud is not simple.

The report read: "New applications can be "built for cloud", but few existing workloads can move to cloud without some amount of
recoding or reconfiguration. This can sometimes be costprohibitive, and some legacy applications will simply never move to cloud due to technical limitations."

Verizon recommended a ‘scorecard’ approach in which each application’s security and risk profile is analysed, as well as assessing whether the application needs updating before moving to the cloud.

"Only then can the business prioritize its overall application portfolio," read the report. "In some cases the best solution may be moving to colocation or managed hosting (for instance if there’s a greater security or SLA need)."

Public or private?

Verizon warned that public and private clouds are inadequate terms to describe a wide variety of cloud deployment options on the market now, and better considerations include whether the workload’s risk profile suits shared infrastructure, and how much infrastructure management does a company want to take on.