(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — More Canadian IT managers have adopted cloud computing and are more informed about the technology than the rest of the world, according to a recent survey.
Conducted by IT consultancy company Kelton Research (www.keltonresearch.com) on behalf of Avanade (www.avanade.com), a IT consultancy company that specializes in Microsoft enterprise platforms, the report surveyed 502 C-level executives and IT and business decision-makers.
The executives were mostly from large enterprise organizations in 17 countries including the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore.
More than 67 percent of Canadian companies said they are currently using a combination of cloud computing and internally owned IT systems, compared to only one-third of companies worldwide.
The survey considered a range of industries, including government, aerospace, defense, telecommunications, energy, healthcare, finance, media, manufacturing and non-profit organizations
The majority of those surveyed agreed that cloud computing has the potential to improve productivity and profits during the recession.
However, the respondents said that security issues are a huge obstacle in adoption, with 84 percent admitting that they had no plans of making any changes from their existing internal IT systems.
Kaytek Przybylski, capability director for Avanade Canada, said that Canada’s lead in cloud computing adoption can mainly be attributed to the country being more “proactive in exploring the technology.”
Despite these findings, cloud computing adoption in Canada is still considered to be in its early stages, said Przybylski.
The survey showed that 71 percent of respondents in Canada are familiar with cloud computing compared to 61 percent of respondents in the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, 65 percent of IT executives worldwide and 80 percent of Canada believe cloud computing lowers upfront costs.
A five-to-one ratio of executives said that they trust existing internal systems over cloud-based systems because of fear of security threats and loss of control over data and systems.
Nearly half of the survey participants said that they are among the early adopters of technology, while 61 percent of respondents worldwide said they are not using cloud computing.
Finally, more than 80 percent of those using internally owned IT systems said they do not have any plans in place to integrate any form of cloud computing in the next 12 months.
In other cloud computing news, Hostway recently launched its cloud computing infrastructure FlexCloud.
