Recession Isn’t Boosting The Cloud

Seventy-five percent of UK companies not using cloud computing say that the recession isn’t changing their minds – and the rest say it has actually made them less interested in moving applications onto the Internet, according to Avanade – an IT consultant part-owned by Microsoft.

The result is partly due to British hesitation: “65 percent [of UK CIOs] say they tend to wait until new technologies are tried and tested,” said Simon Jewell, chief architect at Avanade, “versus two-thirds of US companies who describe themselves as early adopters.”

The survey of 500 “C-level” people, carried out by Kelton Research, only included around 100 people from the UK, so Avanade’s conclusions are not definitive, but the company spotted some other trends: “Companies are not using the cloud for business critical, customer-facing applications, where serv ice-levels are critical” said Jewell . Instead, they are using business applications like CRM, data storage and email.

Users seem to be worried about the security of cloud applications, and losing control of their data, as well as the difficulty of integrating cloud applications with internal systems, according to the research.

Despite this, cloud has a great potential to “disintermediate” outsourcing, said Jewell, a possibility which might threaten both the IT manager and the traditional outsourcer in different ways.