The cloud is the latest juggernaut to sweep the enterprise IT industry, and if you ask most experts, the expectation is that the entire data universe will one day reside on distributed virtual architecture.
At the moment, however, the vision has not been completely sold to the people who build and maintain enterprise corporate environments.
According to new data from 451 Research at the behest of Microsoft, more than 45 percent of IT executives consider their organizations to be beyond the pilot phase of cloud computing, with at least half of that group saying they are “heavy” cloud users. However, only 6 percent have labeled the cloud as the default platform for new applications, while only 18 percent turn to the cloud regularly for new projects. All of this suggests that while the enterprise has embraced the cloud with open arms, the vast majority are using it for low-value or non-critical functions – hardly the new data paradigm that has been touted so far.
