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For example, across the 13 countries in the global study, 52 percent of the IT professionals stated they use or plan to use cloud computing, while much higher cloud adoption rates are predicted in Brazil (70 percent), China (69 percent) and India (76 percent). Across the world, respondents rated the following as their top data center priorities for the next three years: improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).

Today’s announcement adds to the initial survey results released in October, which revealed that workers want flexible access to corporate information from any mobile device, anywhere, anytime, and to the results released in November, which revealed disconnects in worker expectations around information access, IT policies and employee awareness of policies. The latest survey results examine how IT managers are evolving their data centers and taking advantage of new technologies, while working to accommodate trends in the workplace like social media, device proliferation, video and an increasingly mobile workforce. The latest results will be presented today during a live Internet TV broadcast from 8 to 9 a.m. PST at www.ustream.tv/ciscotv.

Key Highlights

Cloud Computing Trends

Cloud use today: Across the study’s 13 countries, only an average of 18 percent of respondents are using cloud computing today, while an additional 34 percent plan to use the cloud.
Top cloud users today: Brazil (27 percent), Germany (27 percent), India (26 percent), U.S. (23 percent) and Mexico (22 percent) top the list of countries that are already taking advantage of cloud computing, exceeding the average (18 percent) across all countries.
Future cloud use: A large majority (88 percent) of IT respondents predict that they will be storing some percentage of their company’s data and applications in private or public clouds within the next three years.
Private clouds: One in three IT professionals said more than half of their company’s data and applications will be in private clouds within the next three years. Private cloud adoption was predicted to be higher in Mexico (71 percent), Brazil (53 percent) and the U.S. (46 percent).
Timing for public clouds: Of those respondents that will use public clouds, one of every three (34 percent) plan to deploy within one year, and 44 percent predicted their companies would use public clouds within the next two years; 21 percent are expected to do so within two to three years.
Virtualization Trends

Server virtualization is not yet widespread in production and nonproduction environments. Only 29 percent of the respondents worldwide have more than half their production servers virtualized, and only 28 percent have more than half of nonproduction servers virtualized.
Top reasons to deploy virtualization: IT professionals cited an increase in IT agility (30 percent) as the top reason, followed by the ability to optimize resources to reduce costs (24 percent) and by faster application provisioning (18 percent).
Virtualization inhibitors: The greatest hurdles to virtualization included Security (20 percent), stability concerns (18 percent), difficulty in building operational processes for a virtualized environment (16 percent) and management (16 percent).
Virtualization on the rise: The picture changes over the next three years. Almost half of the IT respondents (46 percent) expect that 50 to 100 percent of their production environment servers will be virtualized.
IT professionals see big savings from virtualization: Two of five (40 percent) respondents expect a data center cost reduction of between 25 and 49 percent, and another 30 percent expect up to 24 percent in cost savings.
Data Center Trends, Concerns, Priorities

Top data center concerns: IT managers rated their top data center concerns as security, performance, reliability, and budget for maintenance and management.
Top technologies and trends: One out of three IT managers cited mobile access to information as the trend that would most affect the data center, especially in China (47 percent), Brazil (40 percent) and Germany (39 percent). Rated nearly as high were virtualization (32 percent), unified data center fabric (29 percent), desktop virtualization (27 percent) and cloud computing (17 percent).
Business trends that will most impact their data centers: IT managers were asked to select all those business trends that would most impact their data center over the next three years. Two out of five (40 percent) stated that increases in applications and data will be the top business trend for the next three years, followed closely by security and risk management (39 percent) and cost reduction (34 percent). Also high on the list were support for a distributed mobile or remote workforce, and a greater use of video and collaboration technologies.
Role of the network: About seven of every 10 IT respondents (69 percent) predict an increasing role for the network due to its central position in the data center and its ability to unite and manage resources.
Top data center priorities: Worldwide, the top data center priorities for the next three years were to improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).
Primary data center strategy: More than one in four IT respondents (28 percent) named a unified data center fabric to unite storage and local area network data traffic as the top technology strategy in their data centers, with 23 percent naming data center virtualization, followed by cloud computing (18 percent), unified computing (17 percent) and desktop virtualization (13 percent).
Unified computing: Although unified computing is a very new technology, about one of five (19 percent) IT professionals had already tested or deployed it, while another 41 percent plan to test or deploy a unified computing solution in the next 12 months.
Average number of data centers: IT managers indicate that the server capacity of their company is housed at an average of 14 data centers.
Data Center Career Opportunities: New Job Roles and Team Collaboration

Top career benefits: The trend toward unified data center infrastructure has fostered greater collaboration among formerly separated IT teams and given rise to new training programs, new certifications and new job roles and titles.
IT career opportunities: Approximately 50 percent of IT professionals predicted the development of new IT career opportunities over the next three years as a result of cross-training and collaboration among formerly separate teams. More than a quarter (27 percent) cited greater efficiency as the reason for collaboration among IT teams, and 25 percent rated the deployment of new technologies as necessitating closer IT team integration.
Career growth: Countries that predicted the greatest development of new IT careers due to cross-training and collaboration were India (59 percent), China (56 percent), Spain (53 percent) and Mexico (53 percent).
Job opportunities: Across all countries, 43 percent expect new IT job opportunities opening up due to the latest training and certification programs for data center managers. This was the case especially in China (64 percent) and the U.S. (52 percent).
Overall, 41 percent see new career opportunities opening up, with job descriptions and titles such as data center architect and data center manager; leading this trend are China (75 percent) and India (51 percent).
About the Study

The study was commissioned by Cisco and conducted by InsightExpress, a third-party market-research firm based in the United States.
Cisco commissioned the study to sharpen its understanding of present-day challenges that companies face as they strive to address employee and business needs amid increasing mobility capabilities, security risks and technologies that can deliver applications and information more ubiquitously, from virtualized data centers and cloud computing to traditional wired and wireless networks.

The global study includes two surveys: one on employees, the other on IT professionals. Each survey included 100 respondents in each of the 13 countries, resulting in a survey pool of 2,600 people.
The 13 countries: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.