Three quarters of organisations would be willing to pay a premium to enhance their cloud services, according to the latest note from 451 Research.

In the latest from its Voice of the Enterprise series – this time around organisational dynamics in hosting and cloud managed services – the research firm found that companies were most likely to pay more for security guarantees than anything else.

Just under half (48.7%) of those polled said they would pay to enhance their security, ahead of guaranteed uptime and performance metrics (43.3%), enhanced customer service (33.6%), and operational management (26.4%). Yet when it came to how much organisations were prepared to pay, customer service came out on top, ahead of security, uptime and operational management respectively.

The research also found gaps between current offerings and customer expectations. More than half (58.1%) of the 600 IT professionals polled said they see managed services, or security services, bundled in with infrastructure or applications as important to them, yet only two in five (38.8%) say their current vendors offer this capability to a satisfactory level. Only one in five said their vendors meet their expectation when it comes to migrating workloads to and from data centres.

“We frequently talk about pricing competition in cloud infrastructure and applications, which leaves many service providers wondering how they can differentiate themselves,” said Liam Eagle, study author and research manager at 451. “The good news is that many customers tell us they’re evaluating vendors on value, rather than cost. That value can reside in services like guaranteed levels of performance, security and support.”

This is the latest in the company’s missives around cloud and hosted services and strategy. Last month, 451 argued the majority of IT managers were examining a mix of on- and off-premises computing resources in their organisations, rather than “blindly following the pack” to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) et al. Two thirds of respondents said they found recruiting for roles across both traditional servers and converged infrastructure difficult.