A survey of public sector IT professionals in the federal government, that was released on Monday, reveals that only 6.9 percent of those surveyed think that accessing IT resources from a public cloud service is a viable strategy, while a vast majority of 68 percent support a private or hybrid cloud approach.
The survey by Quest Software Public Sector, a division of Quest Software, also found that there's still confusion among users about the differences between virtualization and cloud computing. And, notably, only one out of 10 respondents has devised an "exit strategy" to withdraw from cloud computing or transfer to another cloud service provider, which makes for a significant gap in cloud planning.
While the majority of respondents worked in the U.S. government, particularly in the Department of Defense, the survey also queried IT decision makers in state and local governments and at both public and private colleges and universities. It was conducted by Norwich University, the nation's oldest private military college and birthplace of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC).
Quest chose Norwich to conduct the survey to give it more independence and credibility compared to vendor-conducted surveys, said Paul Garver, chief executive officer of Quest Public Sector. Although vendors and media that cover cloud computing are very familiar with the space, the survey found that 64.7 percent of respondents in the federal space report "some level of confusion at their organization" about the difference between virtualization and cloud computing.
Virtualization is the process of running a software operating system and its other stack components as a virtual machine within a physical server. Running multiple virtual machines in one physical server increases the utilization of that server for more efficient use of IT resources.
