Storage industry confused over deployment of Cloud-based services

The storage industry is still confused as to why cloud-based services are deployed within organisations, reveals a survey conducted at Storage Expo 2009 by Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. and provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions. Despite this concern, businesses still believe that cloud technology will grow in importance for their organisation in 2010.

The majority (79%) said that organisations deploy cloud-based services to save operating costs and just over half (57%) stated capital expenditure savings as a reason for deployment. Other reasons that respondents gave for deployment were business continuity (40%) and supporting business growth (32%).

The results show an alarming misconception around the reasons why organisations are using cloud-based services, said Steve Murphy, Vice President UK & Ireland, at Hitachi Data Systems. Due to the limited information about cloud deployments to date, there is little evidence to suggest that it genuinely results in cost savings for the organisation. Until present security and compliance issues with cloud storage are resolved, moving to a cloud computing model might actually be costly to an enterprise in terms of data loss or fines for non-compliance.  For these reasons, it is equally surprisingly that IT workers think organisations would deploy these services to achieve business continuity and business growth.

Nonetheless, respondents are still confident that cloud-based services will impact their organisations more in the coming year. The majority of those questioned (76%) said that the cloud would be important to its organisation in 2010. This contrasts with only 56% that stated it was important at the moment. When asked the same question about virtualisation, 98% said it would be important in 2010 and 95% believe it to be important now.

The cloud looks set to be a major hot topic just as virtualisation has been and continues to be. It is not surprising that organisations will be investigating cloud-based services over the coming year, due to the hype surrounding the technology. There is certainly a case for the private cloud in the enterprise but public cloud-based services still have a long way to go before becoming a viable business proposition., concluded Murphy.