Most IT executives are still unconvinced about tapping into a public cloud when they surpass their own infrastructure's capacity, a survey has found.
Cloud management software company Platform Computing questioned 100 IT executives at the International Supercomputing Conference last month, and found that 79 percent of respondents did not have any plans to use an external service provider's public cloud when their own resources reached capacity.
Despite this, the survey found that the demand for private cloud was unchanged compared with last year's results. In 2010, 28 percent of firms planned to deploy private cloud this year, the same level as in 2009.
However, the drivers for private deployment seem to have changed. Last year, respondents said they would look to private cloud for improving efficiency, this year's survey revealed that only 27 percent were looking for efficiency, while 25 percent (compared with 17 percent in 2009) believed that the private cloud would help to cut costs.
In addition, just 17 percent said they would use it for resource scalability and six percent for IT responsiveness. Nineteen percent also said they might use the private cloud as an experiment.
Meanwhile, the survey found that organisational culture was no longer the biggest inhibiting factor to private cloud adoption (26 percent) as it was in 2009 (37 percent). IT professionals are now more concerned about technical issues such as security (25 percent), complex management (25 percent), application software licensing (12 percent), as well as upfront costs (six percent).
Randy Clark, CMO of Platform Computing, said: "What's interesting is that private cloud deployment intent contines to be strong, independent of public cloud intensions.
"We expect that private clouds will continue to outpace public cloud models, but that the correlation between private clouds and hybrid use-cases such as 'cloud bursting' [using cloud when existing resources reach capacity]."
Rentokil Initial, the pest control company, recently revealed that it was standardising its email systems by moving its business to the Google cloud-based email system.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, Microsoft released a version of its Windows Azure cloud platform as an appliance, which provides a means for firms to run a cloud service, either internally or for their own customers.