IT Pros Report on Moving Applications to the Cloud

Yet another report has come out telling us how many companies are moving applications or data to the cloud. Last month, I wrote about a survey from Thales e-Security that revealed the percentage of companies that are using the cloud, or planning to use it, for storing sensitive data. Now Qumu, a video platform provider for businesses, has released findings from its 2012 IT in the Cloud Assessment Project, where 44 percent of IT professionals surveyed reported that they would be moving applications to the cloud within the next twelve months, and 44.9 percent said they're already running some applications in the cloud.

According to the survey, the most popular application type for running in the cloud is email, with 25.9 percent of respondents using the cloud for email services. Email has long been touted as an easy win for moving to the cloud because although any business would rate email as mission critical, running email isn't the focus of most businesses. Other high-scoring application types in the survey were storage (24%), document management (13.9%), project management (11%), and customer relationship management (CRM, 10.3%).

The survey also reports video communications applications as outsourced to the cloud at 10.3 percent. With increasing desire for better collaboration in business combined with weak budgets for travel, it would seem like this category stands to rise dramatically. It's unclear from the information Qumu released if this category includes conferencing services such as GoToMeeting or Microsoft Lync Online, but even if it doesn't, it seems clear that more video is likely becoming a part of all sorts of communications.

Qumu is focused on video for the enterprise by providing a hosting platform for company-made videos as well as a variety of tools for making high-quality videos. The company could be described as "a secure YouTube-like service for enterprise video sharing," but with a suite of products for video creation that can help companies produce branded, useful training and other informative content, and present it to the correct members of the organization.

One of the surprises from the Qumu survey was the number of IT pros reporting that better security was a leading reason for moving to the cloud: more than 30 percent cited this reason. It's not so long ago that cloud security was the number one reason IT pros refused the cloud option for anything. Is cloud security getting better? Do IT pros understand cloud security better? Or is maintaining on-premises security getting too complicated? It would be interesting to hear from the trenches about why this shift in impression is taking place. Leave a comment below, or send me an email.

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