Smaller Businesses Warming to Cloud Computing

The most important factors driving businesses of all sizes to implement cloud computing solutions are the same factors that have prompted companies to outsource IT services for years: lower costs, better performance and agility, according to Hosting.com, which recently surveyed 644 executives in a broad range of industry verticals, and including firms with fewer than 100 employees as well as firms with more than 1,000 employees. About 69 percent of the respondents say they have fewer than 100 employees.

The driving factors for adopting cloud services are nearly the same for all company sizes, the report suggests, and business size plays no role in how quickly the executives believe cloud technologies will be adopted.

Cost savings, availability and performance are the top three values respondents believe cloud computing represents, but scalability also ranks high.

Security and support are seen as the two top obstacles cloud computing providers must surmount.

But roughly a third of executives in the small business and mid-sized business categories think they will be using cloud computing in some way at their firms within the next 12 months.

About 70 percent of respondents say Web applications are best suited to cloud computing, but 41 percent say data base operations are best suited to cloud computing. About 37 percent see application servers as ideally suited for cloud computing.

About 18 percent of respondents prefer to buy using annual contracts while 48 percent prefer month-to-month payment schemes.

It is worth noting that Amazon Web Services (Amazon's cloud computing service) says it now has 490,000 developers in its program.