Businesses adopting cloud are happy with the choice they made

May 14, 2012 16:01 GMT  ·  By

Cloud computing opens a variety of new opportunities for a wide range of customers, and the latest research conducted by comScore on small and medium businesses shows that.

Through adopting the cloud, SMBs register significant cost and time savings, so that they can better focus on other areas, the study shows.

Of course, not all businesses consider cloud computing as being a viable solution. Many fear of security issues that might emerge as they adopt the new model, and they are also worried of the costs involved in deployment.

The study was focused on assessing the benefits that SMBs can take advantage of when adopting the cloud, and on determining whether more such companies should move to the cloud if their business requires it.

As it turns out, SMBs that use the cloud actually spend less time and money on security management and also achieve increased levels of security than companies who haven’t yet moved to the cloud.

Commissioned by Microsoft, the new research was conducted among companies with between 100 and 250 PCs in the U.S., India, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. Respondents were unaware that the survey was connected to Microsoft, the Redmond-based software company notes.

“The goal of the survey was to gather data to better understand the cloud’s benefits relating to IT costs, improved security and better time management. For the purpose of this research, cloud users were defined as companies that used a cloud service via a subscription model,” the report notes.

SMBs that are using the cloud are spending on average 19 hours on managing IT security when compared to non-cloud SMBs, which usually spend an average of 25 hours per week in this area.

Additionally, 51 percent of SMBs said that adoption of cloud helped them decrease IT capacity when needed, 45 percent declared they were using fewer internal IT resources for that, and 34 percent confirmed that they spent less time training employees, all of which resulted in cost savings.

The study shows that businesses are increasingly more confident on the benefits of cloud computing after adoption, and that twenty percent of SMBs decreased the spending on the management of security over the past three years, compared to only 4 percent of non-cloud companies.

In fact, 35 percent of SMBs consider their business more secure as a result of moving to the cloud, while 32 percent of businesses said that worried less about the threat of cyber-attacks.

During a phone briefing on this research, Richard Saunders, director, Trustworthy Computing, told us that, ultimately, businesses need to decide on their own whether the adoption of cloud computing is what they need or not.

Microsoft’s role in this is to ensure that they have all the necessary info at hand to make the right decision based on how much they want to invest and on how the cloud would help them evolve.