Enterprise mission-critical applications and workloads are rising, but IT executives are still not confident about running them on public cloud platforms, according to research firm IDC.
Mission-critical systems remain at the core of the datacentre.
"For CIOs, mission-critical workloads are the life of business operations and they see it as critical to run business efficiently," said Thomas Meyer, vice-president, EMEA systems and infrastructure solutions at IDC.
"But only a minority of CIOs are willing to deploy these crucial workloads on to the public cloud."
Enterprises are more confident in deploying mission-critical apps on to their private cloud but remain wary about public cloud-based platforms, Meyer said.
While security, data protection, compliance and data location are the crucial factors holding CIOs back, there are other factors too.
Fear and inexperience of public cloud
Many enterprises do not have much experience of public cloud and are hesitant to transfer their mission-critical apps to it, Meyer said. This lack of experience also means they are not sure about the cost benefits of transferring all workloads to the cloud.
"Lastly, when it comes to public cloud, no one takes liability for service levels for critical apps and for an enterprise, mission-critical apps have to be up 24/7," Meyer said.
According to IDC's research, IT executives perceive business processing and database applications to increase significantly in their mission-critical status.
Most enterprises still run their business processing systems such as ERP and CRM on Unix servers, The IDC study found.
Cloud-first strategy
Meyer said that a third of CIOs are looking to adopt a cloud-first strategy by 2014.
"But even then, they are aggressive about cloud use for non-critical workloads such as web service tools, and collaboration tools rather than for database apps or business processing systems," Meyer said.
IDC's comments came at a HP event where the supplier strengthened its mission-critical converged infrastructure portfolio with enhanced HP Integrity systems, HP-UX software and services.
The new tools aim to provide enterprises with three times faster performance, more resiliency and security for critical workloads deployed into the next decade, according to Mark Payne, European head of HP's business-critical systems.
