Global IT professionals are creating new job opportunities by increasing collaboration among teams in the data centre, and adopting new technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing, but they are also struggling to maintain security and data governance as employees demand more offsite access to networks and information.

These are the conclusions of the Cisco Connected World Report, an international study about the behavioural trends of workers in accessing information anywhere, with any device, and the ability of information technology professionals to address their needs.

The company just released the third and final installment of the findings of the report and the latest results focus on data centre, virtualisation, and cloud computing trends, and evolving IT roles, in the context of increasingly mobile and distributed workforces.

Across the 13 countries in the global study, 52 per cent of the IT professionals stated they use or plan to use cloud computing, while much higher cloud adoption rates are predicted in Brazil (70 per cent), China (69 per cent) and India (76 per cent). Only an average of 18 per cent of respondents are using cloud computing today, while an additional 34 per cent plan to use the cloud. A large majority (88 per cent) 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.

Across the world, respondents rated the following as their top data centre priorities for the next three years: improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 per cent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 per cent), increase data centre resilience (19 per cent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 per cent).

Asked about the reasons to deploy virtualisation, IT professionals cited an increase in IT agility (30 per cent) as the top reason, followed by the ability to optimise resources to reduce costs (24 per cent) and by faster application provisioning (18 per cent).

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

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