TRAVERSE CITY — The IT research organization Ponemon Institute is out with a new survey confirming the trend of IT outsourcing to the cloud.
The survey was sponsored by CyrusOne (Nasdaq: CONE), the Dallas, Texas-based colocation services provider.
More than 600 IT operations, management and security professionals participated in the survey.
Among the reasons to outsource, 70 percent of respondents said their IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly difficult and complex to manage. Another 60 percent said outsourcing services improves companies’ ability to roll out new services quickly, while 55 percent said it’s too costly to operate their own data center.
In addition to being costly to operate, 69 percent of respondents rate the pain of managing data center operations as “severe.”
Respondents predicted that within two years, 52 percent of their business applications would be in the cloud or hosted — up 15 percent from the 37 percent of applications that are in the cloud today.
However, security concerns with the cloud persist — 45 percent of respondents said their in-house data center is less likely to experience a data breach than if they were using a cloud, managed hosting or colocation service. And 67 percent say diminished control over IT resources is the main concern with moving to outsourced services.
The average IT budget for respondents was $94 million. Among respondents, 32 percent of this budget is allocated to outsourced IT services, and this amount is expected to increase to 44 percent of the IT budget in two years.
“This comprehensive research report from Ponemon captures the key factors driving company decisions when seeking to effectively manage their data and IT infrastructure in an increasing digital world,” said Scott Brueggeman, chief marketing officer, CyrusOne. “The research provides valuable insight into the motivation behind the colocation decision-making process.”
As companies wrestle with managing the growing amount of sensitive and confidential data, as well as the potential risks of security breaches, the rationale for colocation and data center outsourcing services becomes compelling.
More about the research at http://www.cyrusone.com/executive-report/ponemon-research-confirms-data-center-outsourcing-trend/.