The majority of enterprises surveyed recently by Infonetics Research have no firm plans to use cloud-based data center services. As a data center investment driver, cloud gets trumped by security, virtualization and an increasing number of gigabit ports.
"For those who are expecting 'the cloud' to be a savior of the IT industry, our study is a bit of a reality check: while there is some interest in cloud-based services, particularly on the software side, the majority of respondents have no concrete plans for it," states Infonetics analyst Matthias Machowinski in a press release on the firm's findings.
Virtualization is more in demand as enterprises look to make their data centers more efficient and manageable, Infonetics found. But investments in security upgrades, both for IT and physical security, was #1 on the list when respondents were asked what major changes they planned for their data centers over the next two years.
Infonetics conducted the survey last month. It queried IT buyers at 134 North American companies with 100 or more employees that have a formal data center infrastructure in place.
Among respondents planning to use cloud-based services, interest lies primarily in SaaS and cloud-based software applications, such as salesforce.com, and those from Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, Infonetics found. Of more immediate need is bandwidth to deal with the rising number of devices and traffic - respondents expect the number of Gigabit Ethernet switch ports to surpass 100 million by 2012, Infonetics discovered.
Also, outsourcing or leasing data center space shows the greatest growth as a model over the next two years, the firm noted.
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