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Root canal surgery officially more desirable than cloud migration

Unicorn spotting more likely than app transfer in poll

Some IT decision makers would prefer to undergo root canal surgery than deal with migrating their business to a private or public cloud.

That's according to networking giant Cisco in its 2012 Global Cloud Networking survey, which polled more than 1,300 procurement bods in 13 different countries to measure the uptake of cloudy tech.

The vendor said many IT departmental heads are "facing challenges with their existing network infrastructure to support migration of their business applications to the cloud".

It found 39 per cent of respondents "dread network" issues when shifting to an off-premise model, and that painful dental surgery, digging a ditch or administering taxes were preferable alternatives.

Cisco said this was reflective of the "chasm" between IT expectations and network realities. The majority of those surveyed (73 per cent) feel armed with the information to kick off the move into cloud services, but the remainder claimed to know more about playing Angry Birds than moving apps to a farm of servers.

The survey cites cloud providers (25 per cent) as the main source of intelligence or information on services available, with industry analysts (16 per cent) and peers (15 per cent) and infrastructure vendors last.

The bizarre comparisons continued in the Cisco survey, with 24 per cent claiming that over the next six months they are more likely to spot a UFO, unicorn or ghost before witnessing their firm put apps in the hands of the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

And 31 per cent reckoned they could prepare for a marathon in a shorter time frame than it would take to push apps into the cloud.

To date, just five per cent of IT decision-makers have migrated half of the total number of business applications now hosted in cloud systems, but by the end of the year this is expected to have ramped to 20 per cent.

To do this, more than a third cited a cloud-ready network as the most vital infrastructure element for further deployments, higher than a virtualised data centre (28 per cent) and SLAs from cloud service providers (21 per cent).

Data security was a "roadblock" for hindering successful adoption of cloud services; the reliability of cloud apps, device-based security and visibility and control of applications on wide-area networks were other concerns.

Nearly 40 per cent of IT decision-makers polled said they would not trust personal data - such as medical records or social security numbers - with current cloud providers and more than half said home networks performed better than those at work.

The top applications to move to the cloud - respondents were given one choice - saw storage come top with 25 per cent of the vote, enterprise resource planning with 20 per cent and email and collaboration coming in at 16 and 15 per cent respectively.

The majority, more than three quarters, confirmed they had already or are planning for next year to migrate mail or web services to the cloud, followed by storage and then collaboration solutions.

The survey forecast that more than half of computing workloads in data centres will be cloud-based by 2014 and global traffic will grow at least 12 times by 2015 to 1.6ZB per year - or roughly four days of high-end video for every person on the planet. ®

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