Google has been pushing Google Apps use big time this year. They took out billboard space, and they recently sponsored a survey about IT departments and cloud computing.
The poll covered 1,125 IT decision-makers. Google has prepared an entire report based on the findings, which is available for perusal here (pdf).
The report covers measurement of IT success, IT’s role in communications security and compliance, mapping cloud computing benefits to IT performance metrics, barriers to cloud computing adoption, etc.
“The findings provide some insights on what types of organizations are moving to the cloud, what value they find there, and what the key drivers for and barriers to adoption are,” says Adam Swidler of the Google Postini Services team.
On the Google Enterprise Blog, the company shares some key findings from the survey:
– More than 60% of respondents indicated that the IT department holds the majority of the responsibility for communications security and compliance, but fewer than 20% feel they are well equipped to handle it.
– Email security, web security, and messaging are the cloud applications most widely adopted, and organizations using these applications in the cloud report higher satisfaction than users of traditional platforms.
– Ease of use is cited as the key motivator for transitioning to cloud-based applications.
– Although price is mentioned as a key deterrent for respondents who are not yet using cloud-based apps, value is cited as a key benefit by respondents who already work in the cloud.
“In these findings – and in our conversations with businesses of all types and sizes – we are seeing that more and more businesses are finding enhanced productivity and IT efficiency when they move their applications to the cloud with services such as Postini or Google Apps,” says Swidler. That the cloud movement is more than just a trend is validated by our research findings, which indicate that 50% of the respondents who were aware of but not currently using cloud-based apps are planning to deploy a cloud solution within the next 12 months.”
Google has had a fair amount of issues with Gmail, Google Docs, and other products included in Google Apps in recent memory. Service has been interrupted multiple times. These reliability issues could be holding back adoption of Google Apps (and cloud computing in general) to some extent.
