63.7% of organisations plan a cloud investment this year

Only 36.3% of organizations are not planning any cloud investment, suggesting that previous fears of moving into the cloud may have abated, according to Ipswitch.

Cloud computing has made many headlines recently, although many have been reticent to move business critical systems into the cloud due to security concerns. The results show that security remains a consideration with companies looking to invest in the cloud and cloud based solutions are more likely to invest in a perceived safer and easier to manage private cloud as indicated by 29% of the survey respondents.

The complete results to the question “Where will you invest most for cloud-based services in 2011?” were:

• Not planning any investment: 36.3%
• Private cloud: 29%
• Public (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft Azure): 13.3%
• Mix of public and private: 21.3%

Monitoring and managing the cloud environment is as important as managing the physical infrastructure. Organizations need to increasingly be aware of the performance, security and latency of their cloud solutions.

“These results show that 2011 could become the year that cloud computing reaches the masses, although it is very telling that most prefer the idea of only moving into a private cloud first which is perceived to be easier to manage and monitor in case of any problems,” says Ipswitch Network Management Division President, Ennio Carboni.

“Moving to the cloud means that organisations have to manage and migrate a number of business critical functions and applications to a whole new platform and then manage the environment, which can cause significant challenges to the IT Managers in that they don’t have a 360 degree insight into what is going on in the cloud.”