A survey of 542 organisations in the US and Europe that have been using various types of cloud services for at least a year has found multiple pluses and very few minuses.

The survey was conducted by Luth Research and Vanson Bourne for CA Technologies. It “confirm[ed] cloud computing is delivering on all of the major promises vendors have made for it,” that “the benefits of using cloud computing are by all accounts living up to the hype, and many of the predicted and/or perceived problems are not actually being reported” and “the more companies use the cloud, the more it exceeds their expectations.”

It added: “One of the most surprising findings is that enterprises by and large are seeing tremendous benefit from the cloud and are having few, if any, problems. Across the board, companies are reporting faster than expected deployment, better than expected results and lower than expected costs.”

Respondents overwhelmingly said that the cloud was meeting or exceeding their expectations in a number of critical areas, for both IT (reduced total costs, superior IT performance/scalability) and business results (increased speed of innovation, increased revenues).

However the survey also revealed that those companies most experienced with cloud computing, defined as those with four or more years experience and using three or more types of cloud services (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service), “are now demanding IT management tools such as end-to-end service automation, service-level management across both cloud and non-cloud environments, and the ability to switch between cloud service providers.”

The research also revealed that, as experience with cloud services increased so too did users’ requirements. “While cost savings continue to be a priority, increased speed of innovation has risen to the top for more experienced organisations,” the survey found.

Respondents were also asked what applications they had moved to the cloud, planned to move and would never move. The survey found that “In almost every category of application, more than 50 percent of respondents said they had already moved that sort of application to the cloud.”

The only ‘cloud’ on the cloud horizon revealed by the survey was that “those with more experience [in] using cloud computing ... were also more likely to express frustration with their inability to manage it.”

The researchers speculated that this could be due in part to cloud implementations becoming stable, constant environments to which IT teams now need to apply the management principals of their primary environments.

One of the most contentious issues around cloud is security and the survey revealed a divergence of views. Ninety-eight percent of enterprises surveyed reported that the cloud met or exceeded their expectations for security and many reported turning to the cloud in an effort to improve security.

“Enterprises are clearly gaining confidence in the ability of cloud computing environments to support above adequate security measures, including up-to-date software, sophisticated identity management capabilities and proper security practices, whether in public or private cloud environments,” the researchers concluded.

However “security continues to remain as the number one reason that an application is not moved into the cloud.” Security (46 percent), privacy/legal (34 percent) and “certain apps are too core/critical to our business” (28 percent) ranked as the top three reasons for keeping an app out of the cloud.

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