There has been an explosive growth in companies offering private cloud as part of a broader offering of managed services, and businesses are responding positively to the trend.

Interestingly, while companies are moving to embrace the private cloud and managed services in general, overwhelmingly, the push to do so is being led by CIOs. This data, from a recent industry survey, found that 67% of companies that have moved to the cloud, or are planning to do so in the next 12 months, are doing so at the urging of the CIO. The same survey found that just 6% of CEOs, 4% of CFOs, 3% of company Boards of Directors were the driving force behind migration to the cloud.

The survey also probed more deeply, seeking to understand the reasons so many CIOs were making the choice. By a wide margin, the main reason cited was the potential for cost savings. Not far behind though, was the ability to scale new computing capability on demand, quickly and easily, which was cited by fully 62% of survey respondents. 51% of those responding to the survey indicated that moving to the cloud would free up their native IT staff to perform more high value work, farming out the nuts and bolts of IT infrastructure to third parties.

Having touted a number of reasons in favor of cloud migration, the survey uncovered the biggest pain points of doing so as well. Here, the biggest concern was the issue of security. While it’s true that private cloud services are significantly more secure than the public cloud, it’s equally clear that some misgivings remain, with fully 42% stating that security was the biggest hurdle they faced in terms of successfully selling the migration.

Is your company on the cloud? Do you have plans to migrate? If you’re not sure such a move is right for you, give us a call today, and a member of our knowledgeable staff will be happy to speak with you about it. We can assess your current computing needs, and help you determine whether or not a migration to the cloud would be of benefit to your company.