Enterprises See Risks In Cloud

Would you move your mission critical apps to the cloud?

That was essentially the question Unisys asked 120 enterprise users in an online poll in an effort to determine what they thought about the risks of moving their various applications to the cloud.

A total of 46% of the respondents said they would start moving applications to the cloud with development/test and support workloads. Another 22% cited disaster recovery -- an important app but one that's not considered mission critical -- and said they would start the shift to cloud computing with it. An additional 17% said they would move quality assurance and pre-production systems before shifting other apps to the cloud.

In sharp contrast, core production workloads like enterprise requirements planning were cited by just 15% of the respondents, who cited those mission critical apps as candidates for early shifting to the cloud.

"(The respondents) are skeptical that the cloud infrastructure used by commodity providers can stand up to the stringent service levels that enterprise workloads require," said Colin Lacey, Unisys VP of solutions and services, in a statement. "Plus, they are often concerned about entrusting those applications to a third party without assurance that the data could be kept secure."

Noting that the poll respondents valued cloud computing, Lacey said the poll results showed enterprise users are still reluctant to give up control of their complex applications and sensitive information. The enterprise users also believe that cost management and operational efficiency of their IT operations can be improved by cloud computing, Lacey added.

The poll was followed up with a pitch for Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, which the firm said safeguards operations and lowers IT costs for enterprise users moving applications to the cloud.