A survey of more than 100 global multinational corporations (MNCs) across, Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific by Ovum for Cable&Wireless Worldwide reveals that adoption of cloud services is picking up among large organizations, with telecoms providers well positioned to take advantage.

Cloud services adoption is up 61 percent from April 2010, with 45 percent of MNCs already using cloud sourcing for at least some elements of key IT services.

Across the globe, enterprises have already moved significant resources to the cloud and are ready to move more application services. The dominant areas of cloud services uptake are in data backup and storage, at 51 percent of respondents. Sectors are also placing different applications in cloud environments. Professional services single out customer relationship management (50 percent) while finance and insurance places strong emphasis on document management (50 percent). Manufacturing places most value on messaging (41 percent) and CRM (41 percent).

According to the research, telecommunication providers are emerging as trusted partners and credible suppliers for cloud services, increasing from 37 percent in 2010 to 49 percent in 2011. "Telecommunications providers' control of the network over which cloud services are delivered is becoming a compelling advantage, as it allows them to offer end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs)," says Evan Kirchheimer, practice leader for enterprise services at Ovum. "This allays many of the security concerns enterprises have expressed over use of the public internet to access cloud services and general security, data governance, and loss of control."

Seventy-five percent of MNCs rate scalability of capacity and matching capacity to fluctuating demand as the main benefits from cloud services, with increased speed of provisioning coming in a close third (72 percent). Cost transparency is regarded as least important, with only 24 percent citing this as a major benefit. Retail respondents topped the poll in viewing scalability and matching capacity to demand as major benefits (50 percent), while finance and insurance came out top in seeing improved employee productivity as a major attraction (50 percent). Manufacturing views cost transparency as far more important than other verticals (38 percent vs. an average of 24 percent).

"We believe the majority of MNCs are currently between 'early' and 'adolescent' adoption phases of cloud-based services, with broader and deeper adoption being contemplated," Kirchheimer explained. "Greater adoption is dependent on the resolution of security, governance, and reliability, and once these concerns are addressed through standardized, tested offers from service providers, more large enterprises will feel comfortable positioning cloud as a preferred procurement option."