Enterprise turns nose up at Aussie cloud

Australian companies aren't benefiting as much as they might have hoped from the cloud trend, according to new Telsyte research, which says that Australian researchers are more likely to reach for services from multi-nationals over those that are Australian-owned or based.

Telsyte said that its Australian Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Market Study 2012, which surveyed 260 CIOs, showed around 35 per cent of Australian enterprises surveyed, were subscribing to some sort of infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service product.

However, the data and the money for the services was mainly heading overseas, with two-thirds of Australian enterprises purchasing the services from an offshore provider such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft.

"Some 36 per cent of organisations have no restrictions on data being sent offshore so the opportunity for global cloud providers to compete with local operators is there," Telsyte senior analyst Rodney Gedda said in a statement.

Not only were international providers more mature, but they were very competitive on cost and bandwidth, he said.

Yet, there was an opportunity now for Australian providers to show the industry that they have equivalent services, based here, Gedda said. IT was necessary for providers to speak out and show that the local industry had matured.

"A significant 29 per cent of CIOs say their organisation's data cannot leave Australia," he said.

Companies were often using private clouds to deal with data restrictions and modernise their infrastructure as well, with 19 per cent of organisations building a private cloud and a further 35 per cent considering a private cloud, according to the Telsyte survey.