Over the next five years, cloud computing is still the highest priority for investment, according to the latest piece of research from Compuware, alongside Research in Action.

16.5% of companies cite cloud as the most important area of their IT portfolio to strengthen, ahead of mobile IT (13.5%), business analytics, big data and in-memory (11.3%).

It’s not a surprise that cloud is pretty big news this year too. Cloud infrastructure (12.5%) is the top area of investment for IT in 2013. Renegotiation of outsourcing contracts (9.6%) and investing in big data and analytics (9.2%) rounded off the top three.

In terms of key tenets within the cloud computing sphere, investing in cloud for test and backup purposes is the top priority this year according to 24.1% of respondents, with private cloud implementation (17.1%) and public/hybrid investment (15%) trailing behind. Full …