Gartner: External Cloud Budgets to Rise

A Gartner IT survey finds that enterprises worldwide are spending 10.2 percent of their external IT services budget on cloud computing services from external service providers.

Forty-six percent of respondents with budget allocated to cloud computing indicated they planned to increase the use of cloud services from external providers. Gartner analysts said there is a shift toward the "utility" approach for noncore services, and increased investment in core functionality, often closely aligned with competitive differentiation.

More respondents expected an increase in spending for private cloud implementations that are for internal or restricted use of the enterprise (43 percent) than those that are for external and/or public use (32 percent).

Gartner surveyed 1,587 respondents in 40 countries from April through July 2010 to understand general IT spending trends and spending on key initiatives such as cloud computing. Participants were IT budget management professionals, including CIOs, IT VPs, and IT directors. Four hundred eighty-four respondents participated in the drill-down on cloud computing and were asked how their organization's current budget for cloud computing was distributed, as well as what their estimate was for spending next year.