The Enterprise Management Associates recently conducted some new research that says that while enterprises are showing a cautious face to the world of cloud computing, those that have already tried it are planning to pile in enthusiastically.

Some Highlight from the survey - Out of 850 respondents:

52% said they planned to deploy cloud services both internally and externally, but only 11% planned for exclusively external use.
67% of cloud users said they have used Software as a Service (Saas)
43% said Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)
42% have used Platform as a Service (Paas)
75% of all organization who planned for cloud computing said they wanted private clouds first and public clouds later, or not at all.

 "The estimate is 11% of [enterprises overall] are going to cloud next year," said Andi Mann, vice president of research, systems and storage management for EMA and lead author of the study.

"A lot of the griping and whinging you hear is the skeptics, and they certainly exist," he said. Despite the seeming coolness to cloud, though, Mann found that enterprises using cloud computing, public or private, almost always had positive results.

Study participants that already used Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products such as Salesforce.com or Amazon Web Services said that 25% of their IT was already outside the organization. And by 2012, more than half of IT consumption will be in the cloud. But are these cloud-adopting organizations somehow farther along than those that don't use cloud services?

"There are a number of different areas that point to this idea that cloud boosts maturity actively and not just passively," Mann said.

For the article by Carl Brooks in it's entirety click here:  http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid201_gci1379117,00.html