Security is a particular issue for companies in the UK and Germany, with 74 and 70 percent of IT decision makers respectively expressing their concerns about this area of cloud computing.

Supplier lock-in (46 percent) and geographic location of the cloud supplier (31 percent) are also prominent issues for CIOs, said Colt.

Private clouds are popular as an option in Spain (58 percent), Germany (57 percent) and the UK (56 percent). Private clouds are seen as overcoming security concerns, whilst at the same time they can be less scalable and more expensive to run.

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