Nearly 50% of multinational corporations are using cloud computing services of some kind, according to a report published today by Ovum.

The analyst company surveyed 102 multinational corporations of at least 10,000 employees, and found that 45% have adopted cloud computing. This compares to 28% of respondents to last year’s survey.

Cloud adoption was especially high among companies based in the Asia/Pacific region. This means the rate of adoption among European organisations was below the 45% average.

Ovum’s study identified some differences in adoption patterns between sectors. For example, financial organisations are happy to base internal IT systems on the cloud, but are wary of shared networking services, while manufacturing companies were particularly keen to use cloud-based networking and data management services.

Ovum analyst Evan Kirchheimer said that most multinational corporations are still either ‘early’ or ‘adolescent’ cloud adopters. Kirchheimer believes it will take three IT contract cycles (between six and ten years) before they become ‘mature’ adopters, using cloud as the delivery method of choice for a range of workloads.

"Greater adoption is dependent on the resolution of security, governance and reliability [issues]," he said.