An overwhelming majority of enterprise decision makers want cloud services, but practically all of them are blocked from adopting it, according to new figures released by Hitachi Data System (HDS).

HDS recently announced the results of a study the IT growth issues in UK enterprises. In the research it surveyed 200 UK IT decision makers at companies with over 1000 employees in a bid to discover the issues that cause “innovation inertia”.

HDS reported that a large majority (81%) of IT leaders say their companies aren’t set up for the digital age. It also established two other pieces of evidence for a growing clamour for cloud services, with 75% of IT leaders complaining that they can’t make informed investment decisions and 90% of the study group confession that their organisation is at risk of being outpaced by digitally-born brands.

However, HDS has released statistics to BusinessCloudNews that reveal that even more of the study group are prevented from applying cloud solutions to these problems, with 86% of respondents saying they experience barriers to cloud adoption. The main blockages, according to Hitachi, are security concerns (reported by 50% of the study group), data protection concerns (39%), budget constraints (28%) and legacy technology restrictions (20%).

“It’s not surprising that IT leaders feel concerned,” said Bob Plumridge, EMEA CTO at HDS, “the digital evolution feels scary because they are having to throw out every theory and intuition they have.”

In response HDS has a launched additions to its flash portfolio in order to improve the performance of cloud infrastructure and remove any performance doubts from nervous cloud buyers. The new offerings include an all-flash Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) F Series, enhanced models of the Hitachi VSP G series offerings, next-generation Hitachi flash modules with inline data compression (FMD DC2) and enhanced Hitachi Automation Director and Data Centre Analytics tools for improved response times and greater effective capacity.