Attenda Limited, the Business Critical IT company, today announced the findings of a survey amongst 100 CIOs and IT Directors, examining attitudes towards cloud computing and managed services. The survey reveals a growing trust in the cloud across both mid and large enterprises, with 87% of respondents stating that they have more trust in the cloud today compared with a couple of years ago.
The survey also reveals that a significant number of enterprises are not concerned about moving their business critical applications to the cloud: indeed the overwhelming majority (79%) either already use, or would consider using a Managed Services Provider to look after their business critical applications. This shows a marked change in attitudes since a similar survey conducted by Symantec in April 2011 found that an average of just 33% of business-critical applications such as ERP, accounting, and CRM are in hybrid/private cloud environments.
Whilst confidence in entrusting business critical applications to the cloud is riding high, the vast majority believe that the skills and requirements needed by a third party service provider to handle such applications are different from those needed to handle a non-business critical environment. Just over three quarters of all respondents (77%) felt that a different set of skills are needed to deliver mission critical applications.
In terms of the factors that are of most importance when considering a service providers' ability to deliver business critical applications, transparency and a proven track record rank most highly with respondents. Provision of an auditable track record for their existing clients was deemed to be the best way to evaluate a service provider’s ability to meet contracted SLAs, in managing hosted business critical applications. This was followed by 'visibility of, and regular updates on, the infrastructure design as a means to evaluate resilience, security and recoverability.'
Commenting on the survey results, Mark Fowle, CEO of Attenda said: "These findings are hugely encouraging and demonstrate that mid-sized and large enterprises' trust in the ability of cloud providers to protect and maintain their most critical applications is on the rise. As much as cloud providers can work to demonstrate the tangibles -such as a proven set of credentials - we also understand that making the transition to the cloud does require a leap of faith. 'Trust' is a hard thing to measure but we know from experience that building and maintaining our clients' trust is one of the most important factors in establishing a long-term relationship - and whilst this is hard won, it can be easily lost."
He continues: "It's also significant that the vast majority of respondents feel that they need different skills from a provider to entrust them with their mission critical applications - a 'one size fits all approach' and off-the-shelf configurations just don't work."