Based on a survey of 1,600 ICT decision-makers in Europe and the US, the report, titled Cloud Reality Check 2015, reveals that the cloud will account for more than a quarter (28%) of corporate ICT budgets in 2018 and the vast majority (80%) of respondents expect the number of cloud platforms they use in their organizations to grow over the next three years.

Despite growing interest in the cloud, more than one in five respondents admit they have no set timeframe for migrating critical applications from corporate data centers to the cloud, with compliance, security, and corporate data governance being the biggest challenges. Furthermore, four out of ten (38%) IT leaders believe that the cloud, as implemented in their organizations, is not reaching its full potential. A similar proportion (41%) agree that they find the management provided by cloud providers confusing.

The lack of clear answers adds to the challenges faced by IT managers. Around two-thirds of applications are hosted in 'secure and closed' environments, such as corporate data centers, colocation facilities, managed hosting, or private infrastructure as a service (IaaS), while public IaaS and software as a service (SaaS) account for a quarter of applications. Less than 10% of respondents say they are using platform as a service (PaaS) for any type of application (see chart).

The proliferation of ICT platforms is also weakening the adoption of a bimodal IT model by IT managers, diverting resources toward application development and away from management tasks. While a small percentage of respondents report spending more time developing the functionality of cloud-hosted applications than those hosted in the data center, a larger proportion of respondents report spending more time managing both environments (55% for data center applications and 44% for cloud applications).

Len Padilla, VP of Product Strategy at NTT Communications, stated: “Our research shows that the cloud reality in 2015 is potentially as complex as the world it was meant to replace. IT managers harbor significant frustrations about the cloud, and there are no clear answers as to which environment is best suited for different types of applications. Given this reality check on the cloud sector in 2015, a much smoother transformation process from the data center to the cloud is necessary. A different approach is required for companies that want to carry out the large-scale digital transformations that business executives are demanding.”.

IT managers acknowledge that the cloud could be a good option for their business. Half of those surveyed responded that their most important applications are in a cloud environment with the ability to scale according to demand. A similar proportion of respondents recognize the cloud's ability to optimize operations in terms of reducing capital expenditures (CAPEX, according to 47%) and operating expenses (OPEX, mentioned by 45%)

Padilla continues: "IT managers see the cloud as a compelling technology that will enable digital transformation; there's no better way to move a new application from the testing environment to the production environment so quickly. However, our study suggests that focusing on ambitious plans isn't the best approach. Instead, focusing on continuous improvement and incremental growth projects is a much more effective strategy. We hope our findings will help IT professionals formulate strategies for adopting real cloud solutions that are useful for their business.".

To download the report, click here.