Companies not considering costs of cloud investment?

While almost half Europe's chief information officers (CIOs) are thinking about increasing their investment in cloud technologies, it should be of great concern that some 57 per cent of companies believe their network can cope with a transition to the cloud without any network investment.

The finding was part of a new survey conducted by Easynet Global Services, which also found that only one in five companies consider their corporate network to be a key concern when moving to the cloud.

Just 43 per cent have identified what they would need to upgrade their network to move to the cloud. More than a third of respondents said they believed the cloud posed a material risk to their business as they could not guarantee uptime to their end users.

Easynet chief technical officer Justin Fielder said that was concerning because CIOs wanting to embrace the cloud were not thinking through the end-to-end implications of their strategy.

"Just as retailers know that their ability to fulfil orders from the warehouse to the customer is crucial to their success, so CIOs must realise that the ability to deliver to end-users is a vital element of any cloud strategy," he said.

"Companies will not get the benefits they expect from cloud computing unless CIOs consider the entire scenario, not just where their data is stored."

The research was conducted by Vanson Bourne in April 2011 and 800 CIOs from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland were surveyed.