According to IDC European IT departments need "significant" improvements before they fully embrace cloud architectures and turn themselves into internal (cloud) service providers.
The analyst reveals European companies admit low confidence when it comes to the cloud. How so? 56% of European IT departments lack qualified staff to support projects, 61% are still struggling to upskill their employees to effectively handle cloud service providers, and 70% still need to learn how to make effective use of automation, self-service and orchestration tools.
Such findings come from a survey of 304 European organisations (100 in the UK, 102 in France, 102 in German).
"The use of cloud computing as an increasingly business-critical technology is quickly changing how companies and institutions evaluate, procure, and deploy IT assets," IDC says. "However, the effective use of automation, self-service, and orchestration tools remains the biggest challenge for IT organizations, while accurately defining costs and implementing chargeback models is a struggle in the business and IT relationship. The transition to cloud computing requires change throughout the organisation-— in people, process, and technology."
The analyst adds that while European cloud spending sees strong 25% growth over the past 12 months, such momentum will be lost if IT buyers are not helped to systematically tackily the hurdles of cloud adoption.
The survey also reveals almost 50% of IT organisations embrace the IT-as-a-service approach, and are ready to negotiate service levels and serve business users as service providers. Only 5% of respondents do not have this major transformation as an area of focus.
Meanwhile ROI remains difficult to prove, as only around 30% of organisations can build a comprehensive cloud project business case-- betraying a lack of understanding of the implications, costs and benefits of implementing cloud computing.
A final revelation states that 59% of European organisations cannot take cloud projects beyond the level of IT infrastructure projects, even if the cloud's benefits are only realised when it is used to drive business innovation and competitive advantage.
Go Less than Half of European Enterprises are Ready for Cloud, IDC Survey Reveals
