Cloud acceptance rising in Europe

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: European enterprises are beginning to embrace the business opportunities offered by virtualizing assets and accessing applications through the cloud, according to new research, commissioned by Brocade.

The research shows that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a distributed, or cloud, computing model within the next two years.

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Key business drivers for doing so are to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).

The findings appear to confirm recent research by analyst firm IDC, which identified that cloud IT services are currently worth GBP 10.7bn globally, a figure that is estimated to grow to around GBP 27bn by 2013.

For enterprise organizations, investment in the majority of cases is in the development of a private cloud infrastructure due, in part, to concerns over security. Over a third of respondents cited security as the most significant barrier to cloud adoption, closely followed by the complexities of virtualizing data centres, network infrastructure and bandwidth.

The research also analyzed the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space, and while enterprises are embracing the cloud and the business advantages it brings, SMEs appear to be slightly slower to adopt with only 42 percent predicting a move to the cloud within the next two years; unsurprisingly, 63 percent of these plan to opt for a hosted solution.

Other key research findings include:

-- More than a quarter of large organizations are planning to migrate a cloud model within the next two years; 11 percent within one year.

-- A quarter of organizations stated that the ability to consolidate the number of data centres was also a critical driver.

-- The availability of bandwidth was also a deciding factor amongst 14 percent of respondents.

The findings reinforce Brocade's vision that data centers and networks will evolve to a highly virtualized, services-on-demand state enabled through the cloud. Brocade recently outlined its vision, called Brocade One, at its annual Technology Day.

Brocade One is a unifying network architecture and strategy that enables customers to simplify the complexity of virtualizing their applications. By removing network layers, simplifying management and protecting existing technology investments, Brocade One helps customers migrate to a world where information and services are available anywhere in the cloud.

"As data centres become distributed, the network infrastructure must take on the characteristics of a data centre. For the cloud to achieve its true promise, the network needs to deliver high performance, scalability and security," said Alberto Soto, VP, EMEA, Brocade.

"What our research tells us is that companies are now recognizing the profound positive economic implications of adopting cloud solutions and are ready to make the journey of adoption, but only with a sound infrastructure in place," he added.