Organisations Not Ready For Cloud: Computacenter

The majority of organisations lack the infrastructure to fully transfer operations to the cloud, according to a report by Computacenter this week.

The IT services provider surveyed more than 200 IT decision makers at Cloud Computing World Forum and claims to have revealed the “polarised state of virtualisation”.

While 20 percent of organisations had fully virtualised their IT estates, 20 percent of firms were at the opposite end of the scale, having virtualised nothing.

Even though the infrastructure to support the cloud might not be there quite yet, getting up to speed is a priority this year for half of those polled.

Twenty-eight percent have specific plans to migrate workloads to the cloud and a more cautious 72 percent are dipping their toes in the water and testing individual cloud projects such as email.

“Most organisations do view cloud computing as a major focus for their business, but many corporate infrastructures are simply not ready – nor may they ever be – for a full-scale switch to cloud computing,” said Andrew Vize, Propositions and Strategy Director, Computacenter.

“The majority of companies are still focused on becoming ‘cloud-ready’ and virtualising infrastructure, ensuring that systems are prepared for cloud before making the leap.”

Under pressure

According to the survey, IT decision makers are a harried lot with a host of other concerns on top of the cloud, including security (16 percent), unified communications (14 percent) and disaster recovery (7 percent).

In total, 18 percent are juggling multiple IT projects this year, including networking, unified communications, disaster recovery and security.

Because of this pressure, 8 percent admitted they are neither looking to migrate to cloud nor become cloud-ready this year, with other priorities taking up their budgets and mindshare.

“We have seen a number of organisations asking for off-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions, and a number forging ahead with ‘full’ cloud and virtualisation projects,” said Vize.

“However, this approach is coupled with a good understanding of the need for caution and due diligence, and after the sheer volume of ‘cloudwash’ and hype we will undoubtedly now see a number of well thought-out, productive and effective cloud uses.”

Computacenter edged into the cloud in January this year when it launched its Computacenter Cloud Computing Service, or C3 for short. It has since followed up the initial launch of C3Mail, an email service, with virtual desktop and collaboration solutions