More Than 68 Percent Of Federal IT Officials Support Private Or Hybrid Models

Government and higher ed IT professionals prefer private and hybrid cloud models, according to a survey. The results cast light on the critical importance of long-term planning and management of cloud computing, having an "exit strategy," ensuring security, and successfully managing virtualized environments.

Key findings among federal government respondents:

-- The overwhelming majority of federal respondents (90.3 percent) said they don't have or are unaware if they have a cloud computing exit strategy, which agencies need if they want to move their data and/or change cloud providers.

-- The majority of federal IT professionals (68.1 percent) believe that private or hybrid clouds will best meet their organizational needs five years or more from now.

-- While the plurality of federal respondents (28.0 percent) named cost savings as their biggest incentive to adopt cloud computing, a large number of federal IT professionals (21.1 percent) believe that cloud computing will provide them with better mission support.

-- A very small percentage of public sector respondents (6.9 percent) see the public cloud model as a viable long-term option for their organization.

-- The majority of federal survey participants (64.7 percent) report that there is some level of confusion at their organization about the distinction between cloud computing and virtualization.

-- Federal respondents (56.4 percent) believe that existing federal security standards and regulations (such as FISMA & FedRAMP) need to be supplemented with additional cloud security standards and regulations, best practices and guidelines.

-- The majority of federal IT professionals (62.2 percent) said that Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra's initiative to eliminate at least 800 of the government's data centers by 2015 is somewhat to very feasible.

-- According to federal respondents, lack of in-house expertise is a bigger barrier to private cloud adoption than upfront costs.

Comment from Paul Garver, chief executive officer of Quest Software Public Sector: Cloud is not the only solution to every problem, but with proper planning and management, can provide numerous benefits to public sector organizations.

About the survey : Quest Software Public Sector, Inc., a subsidiary of Quest Software, sponsored the survey of federal, state and local, and higher education IT professionals. The survey was conducted by the School of Graduate and Continuing Studies at Norwich University, which gathered data from 646 respondents.

Contact: http://www.quest.com