What matters more in cloud computing: flexibility or cost?

A few years ago, a group called the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) published a study suggesting that the main fact businesses would move towards using cloud computing would be in order to reduce costs.

But now that same industry body has found that a more compelling factor is the flexibility on offer.

The CIF has the express purpose of advocating the adoption of cloud-based IT services by businesses, and as such it investigates industry trends to find out which factors encourage some companies into the cloud, and what keeps other businesses tied to their own servers.

In their most recent study, they found that only 16 per cent of companies claimed cost as their main consideration.

By far exceeding that, 53 per cent identified flexibility as the most important factor. Driven by the rise in mobile workers, the ability to access files from an internet connection regardless of location is a winning aspect of moving to the cloud.

At least, that's the case when you look at it from an end user perspective. If CIF's questionnaire was targeted solely at business leaders, cost would appear more important in the statistics, simply because it's still so important in fragile post-recession times. It's not only outright savings that matter, it's also cost predictability, as clients for our fixed-price IT support in Bristol also appreciate.

Nevertheless, these small differences overshadow the big picture, which is one of exciting growth: we've seen many of our clients in the South West making their own bold moves towards a cloud-enabled IT future, and we're here to support them.