SAN BRUNO, CA ? In a survey of more than 700 IT professionals, 44 percent said they’d be moving applications to the cloud within the next 12 months, with up to 33.4 percent saying they will include up to half of their applications.
54.5 percent of respondents touted the benefits of making the move to cloud-based applications. When asked what benefits they thought were most important, surprisingly, more than 30 percent of IT professionals said better security. This result indicates that companies are becoming more comfortable with the quality of security in cloud based apps. After, security, other benefits identified are:
Cost savings once deployed ? 26.9 percent
Better mobility support ? 25.9 percent
Time saved not having to update infrastructure ? 22 percent
Quick deployment ? 18.5 percent
Better for the environment ? 12.6 percent
Elasticity to scale up or down as needed ? 11 percent
Outsourced system support and maintenance ? 10.9 percent
Even as IT professionals report they are planning to move applications to the cloud, many organizations already have. The survey found that fully 44.9 percent of IT professionals are already running some applications in the cloud. The top applications include email (25.9 percent), storage (24 percent) and document management (13.9 percent). Other applications include project management (11 percent), CRM (10.3 percent), marketing automation (6.8 percent), video communication (10.3 percent) and employee portals (11.3 percent).
Enterprises are adopting collaborative cloud-based solutions to enable their people to be more connected and productive. For many companies, video communications have become an integrated part of the corporate culture. 55 percent of respondents site benefits of using a secure YouTube-like service for enterprise video sharing.
According to the survey, the biggest benefits that IT professionals see from using such services include:
Increased access to training videos ? 26.1 percent
Gives employees a ?voice? to share ideas ? 24.3 percent
Increased access to subject matter experts knowledge ? 23.6 percent
Better employee collaboration ? 22.5 percent
Improved organization and search of company video assets ? 20.6 percent
Additionally, the survey found surprising differences between large enterprises and small to medium sized businesses. In all cases, large enterprises were more favorable to cloud-based solutions than SMBs:
Running current applications in the cloud (51 percent vs. 42.4 percent)
Seeing benefits in migrating applications to the cloud (59.5 percent vs. 52.5 percent)
Seeing benefits of using a secure enterprise video-sharing service (63.3 percent vs. 47.3 percent)
?The results showing that large enterprises are more inclined to Cloud applications is somewhat surprising. Some may expect large companies to be concerned with Cloud security,? said Ray Hood, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Qumu. ?We believe that larger companies have more history with IT outsourcing and see the Cloud as the logical next step.?
