Survey: senior IT executive views on cloud computing

1. Summary

Senior IT decision makers are now widely committed to shifting a significant portion of their systems and processing to the cloud, but a discrepancy persists between their perceptions and plans for the technology and those of less senior IT managers.

In this report, we look at the different approaches of these two groups based on a Gigaom Research survey of 500 IT decision makers at large U.S. organizations. Key findings include:

• Senior IT executives tend to see more strategic purposes, such as innovation and competitive advantage, as driving cloud adoption than do the more junior IT managers, who are more likely to see benefits in cost and scalability as the main cloud drivers.
• Compared to their junior counterparts, the senior executives perceive their organizations to already be using cloud more extensively, and to have greater plans for cloud adoption across the board.
• Both groups expect a movement from a primarily private cloud strategy to a hybrid environment over the next 5 years. Twice as many senior execs (15 percent) as managers (7 percent) see their future strategy as being primarily public cloud.
• It is critical for organizations to share and generate support for their cloud strategy and vision through their IT management ranks. This may also require a relatively quick and upfront resolution of any staffing changes brought by the move to cloud, in order to increase receptivity to the new environment.
• It is also important to understand the basis for more junior managers’ resistance to the technology, as there is value in the skeptic’s eye in identifying and accommodating legitimate concerns with the adoption of cloud.

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