Survey: Flexibility, Not Cost, Is Main Cloud Driver

The main reason businesses are moving to cloud-based services is flexibility, rather than price, according to a new survey conducted by the Cloud Industry Forum.

The findings represent a shift from previous years, when organisations looked to hosted services as a way of cutting costs, the CIF said.

Sixteen percent of respondents said price was their main driver for adopting cloud services, compared to 53 percent that said flexibility was the main reason.

Cost savings vs. agility

In the public sector 55 percent cited flexibility, while in the private sector the figure was 52 percent, the CIF said.

“Over recent years the market has been primarily focusing on the cost savings afforded by cloud migration,” said CIF chairman Andy Burton, in a statement. “And yet, while financial benefits are achieved and do drive further investment from companies already using the cloud, it is the agility given to businesses to deliver new services, access technology quickly and to offer solutions that they did not already have, that has driven initial adoption.”

The survey covered 450 senior IT and business decision-makers, smaller businesses and public-sector organisations.

Overall 48 percent said they were using some form of cloud service, with larger companies leading the pack.

Security concerns

The main cloud services in use were email, backup, disaster recovery, storage and web hosting.

About 85 percent of respondents already using cloud services said they expected to increase their use in the next 12 months.

Twenty-three percent said they would not trust the cloud to host their client and third-party data, the survey found.

Businesses were the most reluctant to move to a hosted service, with 54 percent saying they were not planning to adopt the cloud. Fifty-two percent said they would not host accounts or financial data in the cloud.