Survey: Private Clouds, Mobile Top IT Priority List, Unisys Says 
Private clouds and mobile support for enterprise IT are top IT priorities this year, according to polls by Unisys Corp. Nearly half (44%) of respondents said their top priority was cloud computing, with about one-quarter naming mobile devices were their primary IT focus for 2011. Unisys also notes other top IT trends for this year.
Private clouds and mobile support for enterprise IT are top IT priorities this year, according to polls by Unisys Corp. Nearly half (44%) of the 262 respondents said their top priority was cloud computing. Nearly one-quarter (24%) said support for mobile/end-user devices was a primary IT focus. Unisys also notes other top IT trends for 2011.
Also ranking high on the list (at 17%) was cybersecurity. Notably, saving money was a laggard at only about 15 percent. .
In the online poll conducted last December, 80% of the 88 respondents said their organizations were planning some kind of cloud investment, with 45% noting their company planned to invest in private clouds; 21% said their firms were going to invest in hybrid clouds, which incorporates elements of public and private clouds. Only about 15% said their organizations were looking at investments solely for public clouds.
“These poll results are further evidence that organizations are no longer debating whether cloud computing makes sense for their organization. They are now deciding how to get started and what type of cloud best fits their initial strategy,” said Sam Gross, vice president, Global IT Outsourcing Solutions, Unisys, in a statement.
Last year, Unisys CTO Fred Dillman said he saw signs that companies would move from “kicking the tires” to actually implementing and executing cloud computing infrastructure, especially private clouds, in 2011. “Cloud computing [in 2011] will accelerate from pilots to production, with private clouds leading the way,” Dillman said. “Many organizations remain concerned about shifting their mission-critical workloads and sensitive data to public cloud-based environments. This has limited some cloud applications to test and development environments,” he added.
Cloud computing [in 2011] will accelerate from pilots to production, with private clouds leading the way.
Fred Dillman
CTO
Unisys
Unisys Exec Lists Other 2011 ‘Disruptive Technologies’
Dillman also submitted a new list of predictions for the scope and scale of IT investments for the rest of 2011.
Aside from cloud computing, Dillman mentioned five other “disruptive technology trends” that will move into more common adoption during the year. “Organizations [are seeking] practical ways to make their end users more productive and their mission-critical systems more secure and cost-efficient,” Dillman said in a statement, adding “practicality will be the theme in 2011 as organizations seek a tangible and rapid return on their IT investments.”
His other 2011 ‘disruptive technology” predictions include:
- Enterprise Mobile adoption will accelerate within corporate IT environments, thanks to explosion of smartphones, tablets, netbooks and other devices These devices will begin to displace PCs and laptops as technologies of choice among business users. This surge in mobile, in turn, will bring closer to reality the concept of “multi-modal” access, where enterprise users can access resources via any device, anytime, anywhere.
- Social Computing will move beyond marketing and be used both as a productivity tool (within the enterprise), for client engagement. “Organizations have done a lot of work to get a corporate presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter,” Dillman said. “Now we’re starting to see more clients think about how they use these advanced tools inside their company to improve[e] their responsiveness to both clients and business partners.”
- Smart ‘Sense and Respond’ Computing will get more traction, thanks to availability of intelligent analytics and advanced automation tools for end-to-end business processes and transactional systems. Organizations will establish ‘sense-and-respond’ systems to automate complex back-end processes that manage devices within the data center and in the distributed environment, according to Dillman.
- Fit for Purpose” Appliances will grow in popularity. “Instead of buying general purpose computers, infrastructure software stacks, packaged applications software and doing the integration themselves, organizations are becoming more interested in pre-configured specialty appliances that can be deployed quickly and conveniently,” Dillman said.
- Cybersecurity (including biometrics and monitoring) will get more attention in discussions about enterprise IT security. move to the forefront of the security discussion. As cyber crime grows more sophisticated and IT infrastructures become more complex, Unisys expects organizations to take a more holistic, integrated approach to security across the enterprise, according to Dillman.
