A new poll out that I read about says that 60% of European enterprises surveyed plan to start migrating to the Cloud within the next two years. That’s exciting news, as far as I’m concerned, because it means that the cloud is truly becoming more global in nature. It’s not just a North American phenomenon.

The neat thing about this survey, too, was that it highlighted findings that make perfect sense — and mirror what’s happening elsewhere in the globe.  For example, the vast majority plan on deploying private clouds because they’re concerned about keeping their company data private and secure. But, of small and medium-sized businesses, 42% were planning to migrate to hosted solutions, that is, public clouds. In all cases, however, respondents’ biggest motivations for moving to the cloud was reducing costs, followed by improving business efficiency and business agility and competitiveness.  And isn’t every business today, no matter what language they speak or currency they use, looking for that, too?

Clients often ask me about the benefits of private versus public clouds, and which platforms they should employ. I think that the answer depends on which kind of information and applications you want to put on the cloud. Right now, highly sensitive data, such as sales figures and other financial information, perhaps would be better suited for a private cloud, or even kept housed internally. Yet, if you’re looking for cheap, resourceful ways to provide email and other collaborative apps to your employees, why not use a public cloud?

More than one-third of the survey respondents were most concerned about security, and felt that that issued kept them from moving to the cloud. How often have we heard that? Yet some IT experts are even of the opinion that public clouds sometimes provide better security that a company can internally.

Sir Winston Churchill

In this blog, I talk a lot about cloud security because I know that it’s an issue that keeps IT pros up at night — along with worry about whether their servers and networks are running smoothly. It’s a shame to see so many go without so much (to mangle a famous quote by Winston Churchill: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.“)

I think an awful lot of  IT executives and managers — whether here in the U.S. or Europe or Asia — would feel a lot better about both private and public cloud security and reliability if they knew that they had the power to continually monitor the platforms to ensure that all was running smoothly, including cloud service providers, company websites and transactions.

I know that our customers feel a lot better about entrusting their data onto clouds — now that they have a 24/7 watchdog monitoring their services.

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