Many corporate IT managers and staff have a fear of change that is inhibiting them and their businesses from taking full advantage of cloud computing, according to a recent survey from TheInfoPro, which found the phenomenon to be a bigger driver than even budgets for some IT departments.

The study polled 109 respondents from medium- to large-sized businesses and found 52 per cent of them believed they would need to address this fear of change in their data centres before they could achieve success in the cloud.

"That has been a key roadblock for an awfully long time for a lot of initiatives," TheInfoPro analyst Sean Hackett said. "It's where ERP was 10 years ago. It's always been a core inhibitor of IT projects. Changing the ways that people do things all day is not easy to do."

Making fundamental changes to the way in which a business receives IT solutions can seem like a daunting task, but change in data centres can be approached in a number of different ways, Hackett said.

"It's not just changing what people do all day in terms of how they use software, like moving to SaaS, but it's also about infrastructure and about application developers and how they think about developing an application."

The findings of the survey indicate that it's in the best interest of those hoping to stay at the cutting edge of delivering IT solutions efficiently to properly educate their IT staff, in order to better understand the options that cloud computing offers.

"They have to be trained in what's possible," Hackett said.

Written by Jason Morton

Business IT needs an attitude change before cloud adoption