Fujitsu Points To Uptake Of Shared Community Clouds

New research from Fujitsu has highlighted the high success rates for cloud projects, and it pointed to the increasing uptake of shared community clouds as a means of offsetting ongoing security concerns about public clouds.

Fujitsu found that, on average, CIOs and IT managers have experienced 24 percent cost savings in their cloud computing projects with some achieving as much as 40 percent. Indeed, 71 percent of those that achieved savings said it met or exceeded their expectations. Just 3 percent stated that they found no cost saving when moving to the cloud.

The research indicates that contrary to many industry warnings, early adopters of cloud have had a mostly positive experience – more than two-thirds said they would recommend cloud services to a peer.

Postive Experience

By far the majority of organisations are investing in private cloud ownership (73 percent), but the company pointed out that in order to get the twin advantages of pay-as-you-go flexibility, without operational risks, organisations are using shared community clouds (30 percent). 24 percent of the companies surveyed are using public clouds, despite the well documented security concerns.

It seems that concerns about public cloud centre around not knowing where data is located (28 percent); users inappropriately buying and using their own cloud services (13 percent); and data accessed by an unauthorised third party (13 percent).

“I was very encouraged by these results,” said Mark Poley, marketing manager for data centre services at Fujitsu, speaking to eWEEK Europe UK. “One of the biggest successes comes across as cost savings. Early adopters have clicked to the cloud, but different types of cloud will suit some organisations better than others.”

“One of the other encouraging findings is that the private sector market has highlighted the importance of speed to set up a cloud deployment (62 percent)” said Poley.

CRM is one of the most popular cloud applications in the private sector, 55 percent currently use it and 93 percent said they would consider putting it into the cloud in the future.

“Traditionally, putting server in a data centre can take months, but with some cloud solutions this can be done much quicker, which means the business can innovate with less investment risk, which is really important for organisations looking to come out of the recession and do well,” said Poley.

Shared Community Clouds

Poley also explained how the arrival of the cloud, with all its different guises, has given organisations increased choice and a bigger palate. “It is not just about centralised IT and running a DC anymore,” he said.

Poley tackled the concerns about the cloud (security etc) head on, and said that Fujitsu had found that businesses were increasingly drawn to shared community clouds.

“Security concerns are mainly related to public clouds, not private clouds which require upfront investment, so you can understand the anxiety,” said Poley. “Public cloud are only used by 24 percent of the organisations surveyed, but what emerged is that shared community clouds are used by 30 percent. These mean no Joe Public is accessing these systems, only the same type of businesses, so the control of data is much better.”

“It is a bit of surprise in a way, as shared community clouds are not really talked about, private/public clouds get more of the publicity,” he said.

The Fujitsu research also discovered what type of applications are put into the cloud.

Websites are the most likely workload to put into the cloud (61 percent) followed by test and development (57 percent), with email and PC applications (51 percent) being the third.

Finance and accounting are the least likely workload to be put into the cloud (just 35 percent would select this) this is followed by HR and payroll (41 percent).