According to recent global research carried out at Alcatel- Lucent, the UK shows the greatest reluctance to move to the cloud.

The UK showed the greatest reluctance to moving their most valued applications to the cloud. Only 34% of UK respondents predicted that they would be making extensive use of external cloud solutions in just 3 years time – the lowest proportion out of all countries questioned.

So what is it that’s holding the UK back in cloud adoption, and how can we overcome such reluctance in the UK market?

The study found that trust is one of the most important purchasing factors in cloud technology for IT decision makers across all market sectors. A carrier-grade cloud service was found to be four times more attractive to IT decision makers.

So just what is it about carrier-grade technology that makes it so much more attractive?

• Fewer outages! – Well, the report highlighted the weaknesses in today’s public cloud offerings, with two out of five IT decision-makers reporting either frequent or lengthy service outages.

And this could present a huge opportunity for service providers to work with carrier-grade technology to offer the guaranteed performance that consumers and enterprises demand, by building a premium cloud solution that provides guaranteed SLAs, is easy to use and fulfils the business needs of IT departments and businesses by supporting complex network configurations, VPN and other services.

• Flexibility as standard – Carrier grade technology for both enterprise applications and network infrastructure can be best defined around enabling high performance, reliability and security – all features which are typically expected from a carrier irrespective of the size and scale of the deployment.

And carrier-grade solutions can offer greater flexibility and agility for enterprises, as well as being able to deliver physical and virtual infrastructure for true enterprise cloud computing – a clear reason as to why IT decision makers find carrier-grade cloud services four times more attractive than those from regular providers.

• Not all clouds are created equal, but the demands are – A typical large enterprise supports between 250 and 750 IT applications, so before it decides to move to the cloud it must be confident not just of a smooth migration, but that there are substantial efficiencies to be gained, risks to its operations are minimal, it is easy to use and that that cloud performance is guaranteed with service level agreements.

These sort of requirements are part of the course for developers of carrier-grade technology.