Two thirds of companies plan for cloud investments

Ipswitch's Network Management division carried out the survey among its customers and suggests that its results show previous fears around moving into the cloud may be abating. Ennio Carboni, president of Ipswitch's Network Management division says its research indicates that security remains a consideration, so companies are more likely to buy into the perceived safety of private cloud environments – as indicated by 29% of survey respondents. "2011 could become the year that cloud computing reaches the masses," opines Carboni, "although it is very telling that most prefer the idea of only moving into a private cloud first, which is perceived to be easier to manage and monitor. "Moving to the cloud means that organisations have to manage and migrate a number of business critical functions and applications to a whole new platform and then manage the environment – which can cause significant challenges for IT managers." Nedless to say, Carboni recommends Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold suite, which can monitor and record changes of workload, utilisation and network traffic, and notify administrators when these exceed thresholds.