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Businesses worried of moving critical applications to the cloud

April 27, 2010

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A recent online poll performed by IT services integrator Unisys Corp. reveals that enterprise users are still not ready to move a broad range of mission critical applications to the cloud.

About 64 percent of companies surveyed said they are worried of security and privacy issues by moving critical corporate applications to the cloud.

Answering the question “What parts of enterprise workloads would you choose to move to the cloud first?” about 45.8 percent of the 121 respondents said that they would choose to lead with development/test and support workloads. Another 17.1 percent said they would move quality assurance and pre-production systems first.

Overall, a further 22.3 percent of respondents identified disaster recovery – a vital but not mission-critical workload – as their prime candidate for deployment in the cloud.

Surprisingly, 14.9 percent of respondents said that they would move core production workloads, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) to the cloud first.

“Even though the survey respondents clearly see the value of cloud computing, the overall results indicate that they still remain very reluctant to relinquish control of complex enterprise applications using sensitive information,” said Colin Lacey, vice president, Solutions and Services at Unisys.

“Those results echo similar comments we hear all the time in conversations with various clients, not just in the U.S. but abroad as well. While they believe that cloud computing can help them improve cost management and operational efficiency, they are skeptical that the cloud infrastructure used by commodity providers can stand up to the stringent service levels that enterprise workloads require," said Lacey.

"Additionally, they are often concerned about entrusting those applications to a third party without assurance that the data could be kept secure at all times," added Lacey.

The Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, a managed public cloud service and a key component of Unisys' cloud computing portfolio, is specifically designed to help corporate clients overcome those concerns about cloud computing while safeguarding operations and lowering IT costs, the company says.

Unlike commodity cloud offerings, Unisys claims that its Secure Cloud Solution makes it easier for clients to move enterprise-class applications to the cloud without changing them.

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Source: Unisys Corp.