Cisco have published the results of its 2012 Global Cloud Networking survey and has found data protection security is the toughest challenge IT Pros face during the cloud migration process. 72% of those asked said that data protection was their main concern, followed by reliability and availability of cloud applications (67%).
The study, titled "Root Canal or Cloud Migration”, also found that more than a quarter of those asked offered the view that it would take longer to migrate their company's application to the cloud than it would to train for a marathon. However, this was assuming that migration was being carried out without proper planning and processes.
The networking giant polled 1300 IT procurement professionals in 13 different countries in order to fully measure the take up of cloud applications. Many of those asked said it was vital to update existing networks to provide a solid infrastructure for cloud migration.
The Cisco Global Cloud Index recently predicted that by 2014 50% of computing workloads in data centres will be cloud-based and global cloud traffic will increase by 12 times by 2015.
Illustrating the so-far slow take-up of cloud, almost a quarter of those surveyed said they were more likely to see a UFO, unicorn or ghost before they would see their company's cloud migration starting and finishing in the next six months, proving that IT pros do have a sense of humour, more than anything else.
Although at the moment only 5% of IT decision makers have been able to migrate around half of their applications, this is expected to rise significantly this year, with the number expected to be around 20% by the end of 2012.
When asked which applications had been moved to the cloud already, top apps were cited as email and web services (77%), following by storage (74%) with collaboration apps such as video calling and instant messaging coming in a close third (72%).
Around half of the people asked said that their home networks performed better than work and 39% said that they wouldn't trust their personal data such as social security details with the cloud provider they are currently using.
79% of respondents said that they're planning a move to the cloud however, and many of these said that they would expect deployment to take less than six months to complete.