One Third Of IT Budgets Go On Cloud

One third of firms’ IT budget is spent on cloud computing – in particular on virtualisation leading to the emergence of internal private clouds, according to research.

Around half the cloud spend is on private clouds, according to the Global Cloud Adoption survey, which was released by the (admittedly partial) virtualisation vendor VMware, at its user event VMware Forum in London today.

IT Managers: stop saying No

In 2011, 31 percent of overall IT budgets went on cloud, up from 26 percent in 2010, according to  the survey which this year included 1,128 IT decision makers in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

More than half (54 percent) of this goes into private clouds, while 24 percent is spent on public clouds, and 22 percent on hybrid clouds.

“Sixty-seven percent said the cloud is critical or very important, and there was a very similar figure for virtualisation,” said VMware’s EMEA chief technology officer Joe Baguley. In his view the correlation of the two figures suggests that cloud is still seen as an issue driven by technology: “Business drives the requirements, but IT drives the response,” said Baguley.

Despite the increase in take-up, there could be still greater use of cloud, he added, but a lot of IT departments are stuck.

“In the past, IT was a champion,” he said, pointing to the way IT in the 90s enabled businesses to automate the things that differentiated them from the competition. That effect diminished about ten to 15 years ago, when IT became a standard set of tools, and the department moved into a world of cost cutting and efficiency.

“We have built an industry where people’s job is just to say no,” said  Baguley. “Objections to the cloud around security are actually based on this culture,” he continued. The cloud could move into a model where it proactively suggests ways to improve the business.

“The business said they want the cloud, but IT people are still in this world of No.”

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