Cloud Computing awareness has increased dramatically among organizations in India over the last 12 months and a majority of organizations consider it relevant to their IT environments, finds Springboard Research, a leading innovator in the IT Market Research industry.

 The Springboard report, “Cloud Computing in India 2010 - End-User Adoption Trends” revealed that 85% of the respondents showed Cloud awareness in a 2010 survey as compared to only 36% in 2009.

“Cloud adoption and awareness have increased rapidly in India, but a large proportion of non-users still have no concrete plans to adopt cloud-based solutions. While this is currently a consistent trend across the Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region, it is also changing rapidly and the percentage of Indian organizations planning cloud initiatives is set to increase dramatically”, notes Michael Barnes, VP, Software Research at Springboard Research.

 “While a focus on reducing hardware infrastructure costs is the most important driver of Cloud adoption in India and across APEJ region, the strong focus on scalability on-demand is unique to India-based respondents”, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, Associate Research Manager, Software Research at Springboard Research.

Cloud security remains the primary barrier to Cloud adoption in India, as reported by 19% of respondents, outweighing concerns over performance and availability (12%).

Unique across APEJ, Indian respondents identified IBM as the leader in terms of both Cloud mindshare and user adoption plans. However, Google and SDFC also ranked highly and have made strong gains in Cloud-related mindshare.