Most enterprises have moved beyond cost reduction as their primary driver of cloud computing investment.
So said Matthew Piercy, VP of NEMEA at VMware, speaking during the VMware Forum, in Midrand, yesterday.
According to VMware, increased IT productivity, business agility, capacity and availability remain top drivers of cloud computing adoption.
Referring to the company's latest Global Cloud Adoption Study of senior IT decision-makers across EMEA, Piercy said most organisations are recognising more of the business transformative aspects of cloud computing, such as improvements in productivity, business agility and business continuity.
“Increasing IT productivity and improving business agility are now the top drivers of cloud computing in EMEA, reflecting the region's growing understanding of the broader, business-changing benefits of cloud computing,” he said.
The research also discovered that 31% of IT budgets in EMEA are allocated to cloud computing, up from 26% in 2010, as organisations look to empower a more agile, productive and connected enterprise. The vast majority of enterprises (84%) across EMEA consider cloud computing a priority, and more than half (56%) consider it a critical/high priority over the next 18 months.
Regarding work that takes place in the cloud, most are in private clouds (54%), followed by public (24%) and hybrid clouds (22%).
“As a further indication of the growing importance of cloud computing in EMEA, enterprises are running business apps in the cloud and are using the cloud to transform their business,” he explained.
Piercy also pointed out that virtualisation continues to be seen as a key technology for cloud leaders, saying the respondents who have deployed cloud computing on a department or enterprise-wide basis are significantly more likely than others to consider virtualisation to be highly important as a cloud enabler - 64% of companies in EMEA (70% globally) hold this opinion.
“Many enterprises have entered the next phase of their virtualisation or cloud deployments - going beyond costs savings and infrastructure efficiencies to recognising how virtualisation and cloud applications can transform their business.”
Piercy is also of the view that, with virtualisation and the cloud increasingly being used for business applications, how organisations manage the cloud is becoming more critical.
“Enterprises now face a different set of challenges as they look to embrace cloud computing more completely; the challenge evolves from technical to cultural. They need to bring together people, processes and technology in order to shift cultural perceptions in order to deliver the required business results and managing this fundamental change in the enterprise.”
Despite the need for more advanced management, enterprises in EMEA are lagging slightly behind the rest of the world in terms of the deployment of cloud management tools, the survey found.
Among the biggest barriers to cloud computing adoption in EMEA are control of data and security, said Piercy.
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