New Survey Identifies Top Drivers for Cloud Adoption Among CIOs, Business Execs

By Madhubanti Rudra, TMCnet Contributor

When it comes to making a choice between on-premise and cloud based applications, a growing number of businesses are turning to the latter, and will continue to. It seems that at last, businesses have come to realize the many benefits of cloud computing. In fact, a recent Host Analytics-sponsored research strove to identify various factors that influence companies’ varying decisions to adopt a more advanced, low maintenance and cost-effective way of doing business – of course, that being the cloud.

Conducted by Dimensional Research, the global survey, entitled, “Drivers of Cloud Adoption: A Survey of CIOs and Business Executives,” involved almost 330 CIOs, business executives and other stakeholders. The survey identified business value to be an overwhelming driver for cloud adoption among business executives. Additionally, over 80 percent of business executives identified value as the chief driver for cloud adoption. These CIOs, who represented 53 percent of the respondents, listed a range of reasons for moving to the cloud. Many companies, it appeared, turned to cloud to achieve better compliance and gain competitive advantage.

The results therefore, suggest that business executives place overwhelming weight on business value over functionality in IT decisions, which is of greater concern to CIOs and other IT professionals.

Emerged from the survey another interesting fact that that employees – especially those belonging to IT sector – prefer using modern, cloud applications. Furthermore, the majority of CIOs surveyed revealed that their employees perceived the ability to gain expertise with modern cloud applications as beneficial.

The survey also shed light on the common practice of using on-premise software, with 61 percent of respondents reporting they have business-critical software that has not been upgraded recently. The research suggested that companies can fill this void to avoid missing business opportunities by using the most up-to-date, cloud-based business applications.

It will be worthwhile to mention here that this is the second in a series on cloud adoption surveys sponsored by Host Analytics. Released in June 2012, the first report, "Current Trends in Cloud Adoption: A Survey of CIOs and IT Executives" explored attitudes among CIOs to cloud adoption. Findings showed that the overwhelming majority of CIO and IT executives surveyed felt cloud solutions are good for business.

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