European enterprises are beginning to embrace the business opportunities offered by virtualizing assets and accessing applications through the Cloud, according to new research, commissioned by Brocade. The research showed that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a distributed - or cloud - computing model within the next two years. Key business drivers for doing so are to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent). The findings confirmed recent research by analyst firm IDC, which identified that Cloud IT services are currently worth £10.7 billion globally a figure that is estimated to grow to around £27 billion by 2013. For enterprise organizations, investment in the majority of cases is in the development of a private cloud infrastructure due, in part, to concerns over security. Over a third of respondents cited security as the most significant barrier to cloud adoption, closely followed by the complexities of virtualizing data centers, network infrastructure and bandwidth. “We're in the midst of a major innovation cycle in IT-moving from infrastructure designed to automate existing processes to services-oriented architectures that speeds delivery of innovative new services,” said Uli Plechschmidt, VP EMEA, Brocade. “The days when the majority of computing power was in the data center are behind us. Today, we have incredibly smart end points with lots of computing power that are remote, distributed and mobile. Information and applications are virtualized and can reside anywhere within the infrastructure we refer to as ‘the cloud'. Our findings show that European adoption is on the rise, but businesses need to address a number of very real challenges to reap the benefits of the cloud.” The research also revealed that: • More than a quarter of large organizations are planning to migrate a cloud model within the next two years, 11 percent within one year. • A quarter of organizations stated that the ability to consolidate the number of data centres was also a critical driver. • The availability of bandwidth was also a deciding factor among 14 percent of respondents. The research also analyzed the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space, and while enterprises are embracing the cloud and the business advantages it brings, SMEs appear to be slightly slower to adopt with only 42 percent predicting a move to the cloud within the next two years; unsurprisingly 63 percent of these plan to opt for a hosted solution. “As data centers become distributed, the network infrastructure must take on the characteristics of a data center. And if the network becomes your data center, then the network is your business. For the Cloud to work, the network needs to be scalable and deliver high performance and security - without these traits any migration is doomed. What our research tells us is that companies are now recognizing the profound economic implications of adopting Cloud solutions and ready to make the journey of adoption, but only if the foundation infrastructure is sound,” Plechschmidt added. The fieldwork was conducted across 200 CIOs from across Europe between March and April 2010.
