Qumu today announced the results of their 2012 IT in the Cloud Assessment Project. A survey of over 700 IT professionals conducted online by Toluna found that 44.4% of them will be moving applications to the cloud within the next 12 months, with up to 33.4% saying that this will include up to half of their applications.
54.5% of respondents touted the benefits of making the move to cloud-based applications. When asked what benefits they thought were most important, surprisingly, more than 30% of IT professionals said better security. This result indicates that companies are becoming more comfortable with the quality of security in cloud based apps. After security, other benefits identified are:
- Cost savings once deployed – 26.9%
- Better mobility support – 25.9%
- Time saved not having to update infrastructure – 22%
- Quick deployment – 18.5%
- Better for the environment – 12.6%
- Elasticity to scale up or down as needed – 11%
- Outsourced system support and maintenance – 10.9%
Even as IT professionals report they are planning to move applications to the cloud, many organizations already have. The survey found that fully 44.9% of IT professionals are already running some applications in the cloud. The top applications include email (25.9%), storage (24%) and document management (13.9%). Other applications include project management (11%), CRM (10.3%), marketing automation (6.8%), video communication (10.3%) and employee portals (11.3%).
Enterprises are adopting collaborative cloud-based solutions to enable their people to be more connected and productive. For many companies, video communications have become an integrated part of the corporate culture. 55% of respondents site benefits of using a secure YouTube-like service for enterprise video sharing. According to the survey, the biggest benefits that IT professionals see from using such services include:
- Increased access to training videos – 26.1%
- Gives employees a “voice” to share ideas – 24.3%
- Increased access to subject matter experts knowledge – 23.6%
- Better employee collaboration – 22.5%
- Improved organization and search of company video assets – 20.6%
Additionally, the survey found surprising differences between large enterprises and small to medium sized businesses. In all cases, large enterprises were more favorable to cloud-based solutions than SMBs:
- Running current applications in the cloud (51% vs. 42.4%)
- Seeing benefits in migrating applications to the cloud (59.5% vs.
52.5%) - Seeing benefits of using a secure enterprise video-sharing service
(63.3% vs. 47.3%)
“The results showing that large enterprises are more inclined to Cloud applications is somewhat surprising. Some may expect large companies to be concerned with Cloud security,” said Ray Hood, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Qumu. “We believe that larger companies have more history with IT outsourcing and see the Cloud as the logical next step.”
The survey results come alongside the release of Qumu’s latest whitepaper, Managing Business Video in the cloud and Hybrid Clouds, as well as Qumu’s attendance at IBC 2012, the premier annual conference and exhibition for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of electronic media.
