New research from high performance computing (HPC) firm Platform Computing suggests that the adoption of private clouds will increase throughout 2009 as companies look to cut costs without impacting performance.
Platform quizzed 103 IT execs at the International Supercomputing Conference in June this year. The company says that adoption of private clouds at HPC companies is driven by the increasing workload demand of applications as well the pressure on IT departments to cut costs.
Over a quarter (28%) of respondents to the survey said they were planning on deploying a private cloud during 2009. Of those, 41% said that increased efficiency was a key factor in the adoption, followed by resource scalability (18%), cutting costs (17%), experimenting with cloud computing (15%) and improving IT responsiveness (9%).
The majority of respondents (67%) said that resource-heavy systems such as simulations and modeling applications are the most likely candidates to be shifted to the cloud, followed by web services (32%) and business analytics (18%).
However, the survey also found that there are plenty of obstacles blocking the route to the cloud. 76% of respondents believe that business decision makers are not yet aware of the benefits that cloud computing can offer. Over one third (37%) said that organizational culture was blocking cloud adoption. Security, which is often cited as a potential cloud stumbling block, was listed by 21% as an obstacle.
“IT executives are clearly convinced about the efficiencies and cost savings that private clouds will deliver, but as the research highlights, senior business decision makers are not yet on-board. If enterprises are to reap the full benefits of private clouds, the IT function will evolve to become a business service partner to the business,” said Randy Clark, CMO, Platform Computing.
Private clouds, sometimes called internal clouds, are infrastructures that provide hosted applications to a company’s workforce behind the firewall.
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