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As we’re now full swing into 2015, there is certainly a greater understanding over the potential – and the limitations – of cloud computing. Research from NTT Communications has explored the varying issues and argued there needs to be a smoother migration path from the corporate data centre to the cloud.

Similarly, even though cloud will claim a growing share of IT budgets in coming years, many IT decision makers don’t believe it is living up to its potential.

The complexity of companies’ IT is growing and becoming difficult to manage. UK IT decision makers claim they have to support 250 applications on average, compared to 100 in the US, 58 in Benelux and 57 in Germany. Globally, IT is having to deal with more than four clouds on average.

There was also an interesting examination of which apps are most suited to the cloud or the corporate data centre. Office productivity and document management (20% cloud, 9% data centre) had the clearest cloud swing, while many others were negligible – ERP and CRM had 13% for cloud, with 11% and 9% for data centre respectively.

The report came up with several interesting takeaways shedding light on how cloud deployments are developing in 2015:

• There are no definitive answers for which app goes where. Some 10% of apps will never migrate to the cloud, while variables such as the nature of the application, its maturity, and the industry sector in question are often in play
• IT decision makers are still unconvinced by platform as a service (PaaS), while infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the platform of choice for almost half of respondents. “While the industry has always supported the PaaS concept, our results only cement the assessment that it has failed to truly take off yet,” the report notes
• Bimodal IT – a system of IT advocated by Gartner in 2014 whereby two models of IT, one traditional and one agile, work together – is increasingly difficult according to respondents. More time is spent maintaining the current performance of applications as opposed to building functionality for the future

“Our study shows the reality of cloud in 2015 is potentially as complex as the world it was supposed to replace,” said Len Padilla, NTT VP product strategy. “ICT decision makers harbour significant frustrations over cloud, and there are no clear answers over which kinds of applications belong where.”

You can find out more about the study here.