Cloud survey hints at services gap

Cloud Industry Forum research highlights gap between services offered and those wanted by end users

Discrepancies between which cloud services end users want and which are offered by the channel have been highlighted in white papers from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF).

The not-for-profit organisation recently commissioned research house Vanson Bourne to conduct surveys examining end-user and channel attitudes towards cloud.

Out of the 200 companies that took part in the channel survey, 63 per cent said they offered some kind of cloud service to their customers, with disaster recovery, storage and business intelligence rating highest.

However, in the end user survey - compiled from the responses of 450 SMB, enterprise and public-sector IT decision makers - cloud-based email management and web hosting services, as well as disaster recovery, came top.

Andy Burton, chairman of CIF, said the results highlight the different motivating factors that influence channel and end-user adoption of cloud.

"From an end-user point of view, their adoption seems to be influenced by the flexibility which moving their infrastructure to the cloud offers them," said Burton.

"In the channel, they tend to offer services in which they have historically been entrenched, by moving what they do on-premise to the cloud."

Flexibility was cited as the main lure of cloud by more than half of the end-user survey's respondents, and 63 per cent of companies with 20 employees or less also cited it as a factor.

The reason for this, the CIF white paper claims, is that cloud services provide smaller firms with access to technical resources to which they would not typically have access in-house.