Security is the main concern preventing organisations from adopting cloud-based server offerings, according to a survey by Forrester Research.

Forrester surveyed 2,200 IT decision-makers from North America and Western Europe, from both enterprise organisations and SMEs. Around half said that concerns for security had prevented them from adopting pay-per-use, hosted server offerings.
Perhaps surprisingly, the proportion of businesses that had adopted such services was unchanged in 2009 compared with the previous year.

The adoption of X86 server virtualisation, meanwhile, continues to expand. The survey found that 72% of enterprise organisations had adopted that technology compared with 54% in the previous year.

It also found that energy efficiency in the data centre is of growing interest to enterprise organisations, with 60% expressing an interest compared to 51% in 2008.

• The majority of European CIOs are unfamiliar with the concept of cloud computing, according to research backed by telecommunications and IT services provider Colt Telecom.

It found that only 34% of IT executives in the region consider themselves to be familiar with cloud computing. However, of those that were familiar, 77% are evaluating, are implementing or have already implemented cloud-based services.