Hardly a day goes by that I don’t receive the results of some new and exciting survey in my inbox – these surveys are traditional vendor sponsored, poll the very least number of respondents that will still give a semi-credible result, and very much sway the discussion in the direction of said vendor. The other day I received one such survey (although in this case it wasn’t directly from the vendor but rather from someone who knows I have an interest in such things).

Anyway – said survey was a look into cloud awareness and adoption by New Zealand businesses and was couched in terms that strongly references the issues caused by recent natural disasters and cyber-attacks. The opening line of the survey pointed this out in no uncertain terms with the somewhat emotive statement that;

Recent natural disasters and cyber-attacks have highlighted the disruption an IT failure can have on organisations and their customers. Locally and internationally, it seems like every week another company falls victim to hackers, has its servers swallowed by surging flood waters or wild fires, or is knocked offline by a good intentioned, yet overzealous employee.

Obviously someone is looking for a career in journalism, sad The news of the World isn’t around anymore. Anyway, this particular survey polled a paltry 48 businesses and Government organizations from around New Zealand – hardly a number to draw a definitive conclusion but nonetheless this survey does so proclaiming that

nearly a third Kiwi businesses aren’t utilising cloud computing and a quarter have no plans to do so in the near future.

Ah yes…. Let me reiterate, the only valid conclusions that can be drawn from these sorts of surveys are ones reflective on only these businesses themselves. Extrapolating the results out to be symptomatic of a national trend is plain wrong.

Anyway – what is interesting is to look at cloud usage from those who responded. Unsurprisingly web hosting, CRM and email where the cloud applications of choice with 32, 21 and 19 percent adoption respectively. A full 40% of respondents indicated a desire to move email to the cloud in the next two years.

The study goes on to make the point that it’s unfortunate that more businesses either don’t know about, or aren’t actively looking at the cloud. As I pointed out in a recent post about disaster recovery, it’s events like natural disasters that remind us just how much of an interruption to business process outages can be. And, especially for SMBs, the best way to avoid those outages is to outsource provision to someone whose core focus is the provision of those services.

Without harping on about it – this lack of knowledge and understanding is he very reason I run CloudCamps (two this week if anyone in Sydney or Perth is interested) and its why I began the CloudU program – sometimes increasing knowledge pays massive dividends…

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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