A recent survey of 200 U.S. IT and business executives by Unisys Corporation shows that CIOs are the C-suite executives most intensively advocating and driving migration of their organizations' IT resources to the cloud. The study indicates that reducing costs and gaining faster access to computing capacity are the CIOs' primary motivations.

In addition, securing the cloud is the respondents' primary management concern.

Seventy-two (72) percent of the survey respondents say that their organizations' CIO is spearheading movement to the cloud. The respondents far less frequently cite the CEO (6 percent), board of directors (4 percent) and CFO (3 percent) as playing that role.

The following are the factors that respondents cite as the primary motivators for cloud migration:

• Cost reduction/transforming capital expenses to operating expenses: 63 percent

• Enabling computing capacity on demand: 62 percent

• Freeing IT staff to perform more high-value work: 51 percent

• Changing the perception of IT from cost center to competitive advantage: 33 percent.

Steady Movement to Cloud, but Security Concerns Persist

The survey shows that the respondents' organizations are moving steadily to realize the value they anticipate from the cloud: 67 percent see at least half of their IT resources in the cloud within the next two years, while 44 percent see more than 75 percent residing there within that time.

Forty-two (42) percent of survey respondents view security as the greatest cloud-management issue their organizations face. Their response shows that concern about adequate cloud security – which executives have expressed in many earlier studies – remains an issue more than a decade after cloud computing gained widespread recognition as a major platform for delivery of IT services.

To a lesser extent, the respondents foresee cloud management giving rise to operational challenges as well – especially lack of integration among multiple platforms (16 percent) and lack of cross-platform visibility (10 percent).

"This study shows that far-sighted CIOs have a clear view of the competitive, operational and economic benefits of cloud computing, and are taking energetic action to realize them for their organizations," said Steve Nunn, vice president, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Unisys. "At the same time, those decision-makers are clear-eyed about the need to secure both existing IT and new cloud resources in order to protect vital business assets."

Unisys delivers a range of cloud and infrastructure services that enable clients to transition their IT environment smoothly from hardware-heavy data centers to secure, software defined enterprises capitalizing on cloud-enabled solutions for their most crucial business computing tasks. Unisys Stealthprovides an extra layer of security for both public and private clouds, using identity-based micro-segmentation techniques and encryption to help organizations mitigate attacks and hacker incidents by rendering devices, data and end users undetectable on networks.