Source: www.cisco.com

In reviewing the Global Cloud Networking Survey by Cisco, it becomes quite evident that IT decision makers are discouraged with the cloud migration process.  The survey was administered to 1,300 IT decision makers in 13 countries with the goal of improving businesses’ understanding of the network challenges when moving to cloud services.

Why move to cloud?  More than half of survey participants (52%) claimed that it was an imperative made by their businesses or CIO in an effort to lower costs and increase productivity and efficiency.  Others claimed that their migration was an effort to follow industry peers (41%) or meet customer requirements (30%).

According to the survey, the most desired application to be moved to the cloud is storage, followed by Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, email and collaboration solutions.  However, when asked which applications have already been moved or are planned to move to private or public clouds in the next year, email and web services were the top cited applications.  Furthermore, for IT managers who are still in the process of cloud migrations, the applications that were more frequently decided to not move to the cloud, despite aspirations to do so, were email, storage and virtual desktops.

IT managers noted several network challenges that impeded the cloud migration process.  The top challenges include:

1. Availability/Reliability of Cloud Applications
2. Device-Based Security
3. Cloud Application Performance

As a result of these issues, a mere 5% of IT decision makers have succeeded in migrating at least half of their total applications to cloud.  However, by the end of 2012, this percentage is projected to increase to 20%, with more than half of their total applications converted to cloud.  Respondents anticipate the average length of typical cloud deployment to be less than 6 months, with private cloud migration taking longer than a public one.  The survey also demonstrates a large presence of virtual desktops in the future of cloud networking.  Approximately 79% of IT professionals expressed current or future plans to deploy virtual desktops, while 25% already use them.

Critical to the success of further cloud migrations are several infrastructure elements including: cloud-ready network (37%), virtualized data center (28%) and service-level agreement from a cloud service provider (21%).  However, survey results show that IT decision makers are skeptical:

• 27% said they have more knowledge on how to play Angry Birds or change a spare tire than the steps needed to migrate their company’s network and applications to cloud
• 24% said that over the next months, they are more likely to see a UFO, a unicorn or ghost before they see their company’s cloud migration starting and finishing
• 31% said that they could train for a marathon or grow a mullet faster than it would take to migrate their company’s application to the cloud

For more information, read the full report: 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey Results