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The CIO focus on public cloud: “A viable option, but not a top consideration”

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A survey from analyst house Gartner has found that infrastructure and operations leaders should institute a ‘cloud-first’ consideration for every project on an application by application basis.

The report, entitled “Flipping to Digital Leadership: The 2015 CIO Agenda”, surveyed more than 2800 CIOs and found public cloud was an option for IT projects, but only a first consideration for a small minority.

15% of those polled aren’t considering cloud computing for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) projects, while 9% aren’t factoring cloud for software as a service (SaaS). Nearly half of respondents have shifted their priorities from cloud as a concept to a viable option, while 71% of CIOs polled felt an increasing need for context-aware services.

Gartner also asserts its ‘nexus of forces’ – mobile, social, cloud and information – first introduced in 2012 is no longer on the horizon, and reports CIOs aren’t looking enough at the long-term future. “If they haven’t already, I&O leaders must ready themselves and their organisations for a culture of experimentation, innovation and deployment of post-nexus technologies,” the analysts argue.

Regular readers of CloudTech will recall adoption rates of public cloud among CIOs isn’t what it could be. In January, investment firm Piper Jaffray polled 112 CIOs across eight industries and found the security of public cloud was cited by 35% as a primary reason for keeping data on premise. Regarding specific vendors, AWS remained the most popular public cloud provider among CIOs, with Microsoft and Rackspace completing the top three.

Elsewhere, numbers from tech giant SAP in association with Oxford Economics found 99% of its global respondents, based on the C-suite, heads of business units and IT and operations executives, said cloud computing was part of their company’s business strategy. Seven in 10 (69%) say they expect to make moderate to heavy cloud investments over the next three years, as well as step up their migration of core business functions to the cloud.