IDC recently published the findings from a survey on IT cloud services (cloud computing). The survey was conducted on 244 IT executives/CIOs and their colleagues about their companies’ use of, and views about, IT Cloud Services. Summary of top three findings from this survey is mentioned below in two categories:

Benefits:

1) 63.9% find the number one benefit of cloud services in easy and fast deployment

2) 61.5% of the respondents find the pay only for what you use as benefit #2.

3) 57% responded agreeing the #3 benefit of using cloud services is, less in house IT staff and cost.

Challenges:

1) 74.6% find security as the number one challenge

2) 63.1% find performance as number two challenge. Not sure how performance is #2 concern. Isn’t cloud computing about providing servers on demand?

3) 63.1% find availability as #3 challenge

The blog post providing more details on this survey is available here.