BANGALORE: Global buyers of cloud applications cite cost, innovation and agility as reasons for adoption, according to a recent survey by Gartner, Inc. In May and June 2014, Gartner conducted a survey across 10 countries in four regions to examine organizations' adoption and deployment of cloud services across SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). The countries included within the 2014 survey were the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, France, China, India, South Korea and Australia.

"The most commonly cited reasons the survey found for deploying SaaS were for development and testing production/mission-critical workloads," said Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner. "We've seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects. Today, the projects are mission-critical and production grade. This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation (SFA) and email."

Forty-four percent of survey respondents said that overall cost reduction continues to dominate as the main reason for investment. However, when the data is organized by role, the cloud adoption survey indicates that "cost reduction" rated highest for the more junior IT roles (IT staff and IT managers). Senior business executives (excluding CIOs) also rated "cost reduction" as a key benefit, but not at the same rate as the IT staff. The CIO and IT director roles all rated "cloud is a modern approach," "innovation" and "operational agility" as top drivers. The senior IT leaders also rated "business advantage" significantly higher than junior IT roles.

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