CIO survey advises firms to think twice about ROI before diving into the cloud

LONDON, 15th October 2009 – Cloud computing may be the hottest buzzword in IT right now, but enterprises should take a step back to consider the real costs and benefits before diving into such a strategy, according to research published today by enterprise systems management vendor Quest Software. 

Cloud promises multiple benefits for enterprise organisations, yet concerns persist over the true extent of the cost savings associated with this technology.  Almost 75 per cent of those CIOs surveyed as part of Quest’s study, which encompassed 100 CIOs from UK enterprise organisations with over 1,000 employees, currently feel unconvinced that switching to a cloud-based applications infrastructure will reduce IT costs for their organisations. 

Confusion also persists over the current costs of enterprise IT applications, according to Quest’s study.  Half of the CIOs surveyed claim they lack a fully-accurate picture of how much their existing applications infrastructure is costing, making it difficult to calculate the potential financial benefits of cloud.  As such, just under half (44 per cent) have no plans at this stage to use cloud computing.  This figure may be poised for growth, however, with 20 per cent of these organisations already actively using cloud within their applications stack. 

“We’re certainly not saying that cloud computing is a false dawn for enterprise IT – indeed, this technology promises a wide range of benefits to organisations large and small,” comments Joe Baguley, CTO – Europe, Quest Software.  “What we would say, however, is that companies should not rush head-first into adopting this technology before firstly taking a step back to analyse current costs and potential benefits of a switch to cloud.  Packages such as our own Foglight solution application monitoring solution already provide some useful pointers and we plan to integrate even more application-costing functionality in the near future,” he explains. 

Cost-savings aside, security was identified as the next biggest obstacle to widespread enterprise adoption of cloud, with 38 per cent of respondents identifying this area as prime barrier.  Other issues highlighted by Quest’s study included worries over the technical complexity of cloud implementation and lack of understanding of this technology’s benefits amongst potential customers. 

"For CIOs cloud computing is a typically enigmatic ITC subject - largely undefined, yet increasingly impossible to avoid,” explains Martin Hingley, ITC Market Analyst at ITCandor Limited. “Quest is helping by filtering out the hype and delivering software to enable the interaction between private and public developments. Its survey is interesting in pointing out the business, pricing and technical challenges."

Joe Baguley explains that, “Although enterprises are right to query areas like data security and migration paths, these considerations needn’t be game-breakers for cloud. It simply falls to the vendor community to ensure that customers are fully aware of the options available to them; that the tools exist to deliver seamless migration of mission-critical applications; and to ensure that facilities exist to roll-back cloud migrations where technical glitches do occur.  Cloud computing is poised to change the enterprise IT game and Quest is looking forward to helping CIOs face this brave new world,” he concludes. 

For more information on Quest’s products, please visit: http://www.quest.com