Novell survey reveals widespread adoption of private clouds

Novell, workload management company, on Tuesday announced the results of a new Harris Interactive survey of more than 200 IT leaders at large enterprise organizations.

The survey, sponsored by Novell, reveals much broader adoption of cloud computing than has been suggested by previous research, and shows accelerating momentum behind developing private cloud infrastructures.

The research strongly suggests cloud computing — both public and private — will be an increasing part of the mix of resources deployed by enterprise IT organizations, and that companies are particularly interested in simplifying management across their integrated physical, virtual and cloud environments.

According to this survey by Harris Interactive, focused primarily on IT director and above at large enterprises organizations (2,500-20,000+ employees), 77 percent report using some form of cloud computing today, much higher than previously reported.

Private clouds are the next logical step for organizations already implementing virtualization, according to 89 percent of the respondents.

The survey revealed 34 percent of survey respondents are using a mixed approach of private and public cloud computing, with 43 percent planning to increase their use of the combined approach.

87 percent of respondents believe public cloud computing adoption will occur alongside of, instead of replacing, company-owned data centers, with 92 percent indicating an increase in public cloud use as current IT platforms are replaced.

31 percent of respondents find that a key benefit to private cloud computing is the ability to manage a heterogeneous infrastructure.

The Harris Interactive study also revealed security as a leading barrier to cloud computing adoption, with 83 percent of survey respondents feeling private cloud computing offers most of the advantages of public cloud computing (freedom from maintaining hardware, lower cost upkeep, resource scalability, lower initial costs) without the security and compliance issues of the public cloud.

Additional findings include:
? 91 percent are concerned about security issues in the public cloud, with 50 percent indicating security as the primary barrier to implementation.
? 86 percent believe data is more secure in a private cloud.
? 76 percent of those surveyed feel outside vendors are not as diligent about data security as internal IT departments.
? Difficulty maintaining regulatory policy compliance in the public cloud versus that of the private cloud was an issue for 81 percent of respondents.