Nervous chief executives are putting the block on moves to the cloud, even when their IT staff believe it’s the best way forward.  

According to a new survey most CEOs are wary of moving critical applications to the cloud, citing concerns about security and performance,

The research, sponsored by Symantec, found that 53 percent of British CEOs are less than somewhat open’ to the concept of moving to a private cloud – this compares starkly to the responses from IT personnel, 72 percent of whom are looking to move to private cloud implementations.

 Seventy seven CEOs had concerns about security while 71 percent said that reliability and performance were issues. However, the same survey revealed that attempts by these companies to virtualise their storage and servers had been highly successful, suggesting that a degree of education was needed to persuade CEOs of the security and reliability of the cloud.

 In fact, most businesses are now well down the path towards virtualisation with more than half adopting the technology. Companies have expressed complete satisfaction with the results of the migration, citing improvements in agility, scability and disaster recovery.

 However, moving to cloud computing has presented IT departments with a greater challenge and attempts to move to a private cloud will necessitate some new thinking.  “Cloud computing represents a major shift within IT – changing from a traditional IT delivery to a service-provider model.  Moving to the cloud is a complex evolution for many companies and it’s essential that IT and executives are aligned on initiatives,” said John Magee, vice president of virtualisation and cloud solutions, Symantec.