ITWire

According to Cloud in Australia, a survey of 179 chief information officers which was commissioned by Fujitsu and Microsoft and conducted by Connection Research, 82.4 per cent of Australian organisations consider having their data held in this country as important when they consider a move to the cloud.

This will come as a vindication for Fujitsu’s approach to cloud, as the company has invested heavily in data centres to allow local companies to access a local instance of Fujitsu’s cloud. Microsoft meanwhile continues to offer Australians cloud services out of its Singapore data centre, and to date has resisted overtures from Telstra which has in the past indicated it would like to offer Microsoft software as a service out of its local data centre.

Data sovereignty however was not the most important issue for most CIOs. Instead data security, privacy and support from the supplier were the most important issues when CIOs were considering which cloud service to adopt.

Most respondents to the survey acknowledged that cloud computing had been over-hyped, however in spite of this they acknowledged that it was an important technology approach.

However only 28.4 per cent of organisations reported having budget for either a cloud pilot or project, and only 19.8 per cent had a private cloud budget. Contrasting with that, 36.1 per cent of organisations had a budget for a desktop virtualisation pilot or project.

The key drivers for moving to the cloud were nominated as lower cost, scalability and a reduction in capital expenditure. The least important issue was the green credentials of cloud computing according to respondents.

In terms of the applications being migrated to the cloud, email and messaging lead the pack. These are followed by customer relationship management and sales for automation; disaster recovery; and collaboration.