According to the results of the Centracon study, availability of the service, data protection and data security are top of the requirement profile - more than 80 percent of respondents believe that they must be guaranteed. Economic benefits from a reduction in operating and infrastructure expenses should also be expected to be on the benefit side. For three-quarters of users, a source-cost distribution is important, and 64 percent expected a high flexibility in the usage scenarios, similar to a simple scalability.By comparison, collaborative functions such as collaborating with external parties or co-authoring documents play a minor role, according to the study. Although they are also desired by a majority of companies, they are rather positioned behind the requirements ranking.
On the other hand, given the current cloud discussion, the issue of security is by no means surprisingly at the forefront of possible migration hurdles . For example, 62 percent of IT executives expected that data protection requirements could not be easily implemented. The skepticism to be derived from the results partly also affects the compliance requirements of the companies. Adapting to the individual needs of employees could also be difficult in the eyes of every second respondent.The integration of these services into the existing IT service landscape does not pose too much a challenge for most IT managers. The complexity of such a migration project does not cause much concern. The acceptance of Office 365 among the employees will also not be done as a critical decision aspect, also feared insufficient transparency of the variants of the cloud service, only a few.
However, the employment with the Microsoft world for the time being largely restrained. Only one fifth of the companies surveyed have dealt with it in detail and in a decision-oriented manner. Another 16 percent would also have taken a closer look at Office 365, but currently without migration intent. On the other hand, the cloud-based office product is currently only in every seventh case completely disinterested.
"Of course, IT executives right up to CIOs and CEOs are insecure because of the continuous reporting on intelligence services not only in the US, but also in Europe," interprets Marcus Zimmermann, Senior IT Business Consultant at Centracon AG, the results. "Also recent discussions and criticisms about the planned EU-wide data protection regulationcreate confusion when it comes to the cloud. Many companies are not yet sufficiently concerned with developing a position on cloud services at all. This explains why influencing factors and dependencies on data protection and data security are not yet transparent for a specific cloud offering in companies and are initially seen as the number one obstacle. "
