Emerging nations more upbeat about Cloud computing: Study

Cloud computing has in the last few years caught the imagination of IT leaders in emerging nations like India, Brazil and China who are excited about its transformational and innovative potential while in developed markets it is mostly seen as a cost-cutting tool, says a global study.

"IT leaders in emerging nations like India, Brazil and China are more upbeat about Cloud given its transformational and innovative potential; in developed markets it is mostly seen as a tool for cost-cutting. Despite existing and potential challenges, India respondents cited a high level of satisfaction with their existing cloud providers," said the study done by Cisco Consulting Services (CCS) along with Intel.

The study showed that about 83 percent of respondents in India were "very satisfied" and another 13 percent "somewhat satisfied" with Cloud, representing a total 96 percent positive rating.

Cloud computing, or the cloud, is commonly used to refer to network-based services which appear to be provided by real server hardware, which in fact are served up by virtual hardware, simulated by software running on one or more real machines. Such virtual servers do not physically exist and can, therefore, be moved around and scaled up (or down) on the fly without affecting the end user -- arguably, rather like a cloud.

The popularity of the term can be attributed to its use in marketing to sell hosted services in the sense of application service provisioning that run client server software on a remote location.

Neeraj Arora, director, Cloud Computing, Cisco Consulting Services, Asia Pacific, Japan and China, said: "As cloud adoption in India is becoming mainstream, it is interesting to see that a number of cloud adoption decisions are being initiated by the business heads. IT departments need to increasingly re-model the way in which they partner with business."

The study surveyed 4,226 IT leaders in 18 industries across nine key economies including 600 from India.

But security and privacy issues were seen as a clear inhibitor to cloud growth. "In India, complexity of managing third parties was seen as a major limitation," the study said.

It said that despite the rise of line of business influence, IT respondents - especially those in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil - believe that IT will maintain a centralized and well-funded role, managing Cloud solutions with consistent policy and security solutions.