Cloud is being tipped as one of the major growth areas this year as businesses try to place their bets of where the savings in IT will be coming from.
With 2011 likely to remain a tough trading environment the prospects of savings around cloud will be welcomed by businesses looking for a way of driving their efficiency forward this year.
Figures from analysts indicate that cloud is growing, with the preference of private clouds rather than public providers over fears of security and ability to address detailed requirements.
"While 2010 may have been the year of cloud talk, 2011 is the year of cloud action," said Colin Bannister, vice president and CTO of CA Technologies UK & Ireland.
"Cloud computing will become the predominate way that organisations operate via private clouds. Organisations will uncover realistic, practical uses that give them the flexibility and speed they require to better meet the fast-changing needs of the business" he added.
"The adoption of cloud computing environments will continue apace in 2011. However, reality will set in as more IT managers realise they have to manage and integrate it with the rest of their IT infrastructure. It's no small task. What they're going to find out is that they have to work out integration back into legacy environments - this is something that the large public cloud providers just cannot address at this time," said Craig Beddis, senior vice president of rest of world at UC4 Software.