Exclusive: IT workers get cold feet on cloud migration

Research has shown that IT professionals are becoming increasingly reluctant to move to the cloud, despite all the hype surrounding it.

Computing questioned 200 IT professionals and saw a 10 per cent decline in the number of respondents planning to move their mission-critical applications to the cloud.

In addition, a quarter (25 per cent) stated that they do not believe it is appropriate to do so, an increase of five percentage points since last year.

Meanwhile, the number of respondents planning to move basic processing and tasks into the cloud was up two points as nine per cent said it is on their agenda. However, fewer respondents said they have long-term plans to move the processes into the cloud: that figure had decreased from 43 per cent to 37 per cent.

It is not clear whether this is the result of cloud migrations that have already taken place over the last year.

A considerable 11 per cent said that they didn't think it was appropriate to move even basic processes to the cloud, up from seven per cent last year.

The most frequently cited concern was security, with respondents saying a move to the cloud would be risky.

Seperately, research from the Cloud Industry Forum polling 400 IT leaders showed that – though 48 per cent of businesses are already using the cloud in one form or another – only 20 per cent of these have migrated accounting or financial applications.

A second widely cited concern was the inability to calculate return on investments in the cloud.

A third piece of research questioning 800 CIOs and senior IT managers across Europe, commissioned by Easynet Global Services, confirmed this trend.

Less than a third (31 per cent) of respondents believed they could accurately measure the return on investment from cloud projects.

"CIOs must approach the cloud with a clear strategy in mind, yet our study shows a worrying laissez-faire attitude to investments," said Justin Fielder, CTO at Easynet Global Services.