Performance concerns are the biggest inhibitors to enterprises adopting cloud services, research by Alcatel-Lucent suggests.
IT decision makers identified performance (stability, response time, end-to-end availability) as the most important aspect of cloud solutions needing improvement, as well as cost, security and ease of use.
The market study surveyed 3,886 IT decision makers at medium- and large-sized multinational technology companies in the UK, the US, France, India, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
While the results do reveal rapid adoption of cloud services by major enterprises across various market sectors, it also points to weaknesses in public cloud services, led by risks related to availability and quality of service.
The survey results show that two-thirds of IT decision makers don’t use the cloud for essential business applications for fear of service outages; 46pc of survey respondents find current cloud service system delays unacceptable; one in four respondents said there’s no simple resolution path when service level agreements (SLAs) are not met; and two out of five IT decision makers reported either frequent or lengthy service outages.
More cloud adoption reluctance in some sectors than others
Certain sectors showed greater reluctance to adopt cloud services than others. Finance, insurance, healthcare and government sectors – industries in which security and performance are essential for services and applications – are the most reluctant to embrace cloud.
“Not all clouds are created equal,” said Dor Skuler, Alcatel-Lucent vice-president of Cloud Solutions.
“A typical large enterprise supports between 250 and 750 IT applications, so before it decides to move them to the cloud it must be confident of a smooth migration. It needs to ensure that there are substantial efficiencies to be gained, risks to its operations are minimal, it is easy to use and that cloud performance is guaranteed with service level agreements.
“Communications service providers can meet those expectations. By orchestrating and optimising the assets within their networks and the network itself, they can meet the stringent cloud service delivery demands of consumers and businesses,” Skuler added.
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