Study: IT shops have cash in hand for cloud computing

More than 80% of large enterprises are at least in trial stage on a cloud computing initiative, according to a new study released today, signaling potentially solid demand for this new style of managed services.

The survey of 250 North American IT managers was conducted by Applied Research in June and commissioned by vendor F5 Networks, which builds tools for delivering and accelerating enterprise applications. The full survey results are available here.

Half of the survey respondents said they’ve already deployed a public cloud computing application. In addition, 45% said they’ve deployed so-called “private clouds,” in which the IT department manages the application infrastructure and delivers cloud-based services across the enterprise.

In perhaps the most promising finding for cloud providers, 66% of respondents said they have a dedicated budget to fund cloud-computing initiatives.

While respondents were encouraged by the cost savings and reduced complexity of using cloud-based services, widespread deployment of such managed services depend on “solving access, security and performance concerns,” according to the study.

Other findings from the survey include:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) is perhaps the best known flavor of cloud computing, but respondents ranked Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service as the most important styles of cloud computing
• The most important supporting technology for cloud computing was deemed access control (90% of respondents); also important: network security and virtualization
• While the IT department influences cloud-computing purchases, application developers and line-of-business managers also influence the purchase process.

The survey also tried to find some consensus on how best to define the term “cloud computing.” Respondents were shown six different industry definitions of the term, none of which had overwhelming support. In response, vendor F5 conducted a focus group of IT managers, network architects and cloud service providers, which together came up with their best take on a definition for cloud computing:

“Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the ‘cloud’ that supports them. Furthermore, cloud computing employs a model for enabling available, convenient, and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”