This finding is apparent by a new commissioned cloud survey conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of BMC that suggests a comprehensive cloud strategy can alleviate growing tensions between business and IT teams.
BMC Software's study entitled 'Delivering on High Cloud Expectations', includes in-depth responses from 327 enterprise infrastructure executives and architects across the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Asia Pacific generated 32 percent of the total responses, and 91 percent of firms in the region said they will support the use of unmanaged cloud services within the next 24 months.
About 97 percent respondents in the Asia Pacific said they will support the use of managed cloud services within the next 24 months.
"This survey has helped us to pinpoint the pains felt by both the business and IT as they struggle to adapt IT strategies to the avalanche of public cloud consumption," said Mark Settle, BMC's CIO. "The conclusion is that the need for a comprehensive, unified environment is becoming a top priority for business to connect everything - from the mainframe to the cloud. The BMCCloud Lifecycle Management solution provides a true foundation for an integrated, enterprise-class environment that allows businesses to support any infrastructure in the cloud, now and in the future."
Cost reduction is the top IT priority in the next 12 months, and complexity reduction is the top strategy in order to achieve savings.
Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of the CIOs surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that their business executives see cloud as a way to be independent of IT and about 58 percent of respondents are running mission-critical workloads in the unmanaged public cloud regardless of policy.
Of those surveyed, 79 percent plan to support running mission-critical workloads on unmanaged public cloud services in the next two years, indicating a growing acknowledgement that public cloud services must be a part of a comprehensive cloud strategy.
Seventy-one percent of respondents think IT operations should be responsible for ensuring public cloud services address their firm's requirements for performance, security and availability.
Sixty-one percent of respondents agree that it will be difficult to provide the same level of management across public and private cloud services.
"CIOs sense the pressure that cloud is applying to their organisations and are prioritising the creation of a comprehensive cloud strategy for their firms in the coming year," according to the Forrester study. This strategy must create a path towards cloud in order to unify management across public and private, automate complexity, and create transparency so the business and IT can have real conversations about cost.