A new survey has found that the number of companies relying on cloud services for the majority of their applications is likely to increase significantly by the end of 2012.

Including 1,300 IT executives, the 2012 Cisco Global Networking Survey found that the current percentage of participants' organizations relying on the cloud to deliver the majority of their software applications is only 5 percent. However, 20 percent anticipate moving most of their software applications to the cloud by the end of this year.

Analyzing the results, Cisco senior marketing director Inbar Lasser-Raab explained that companies are making this shift because of the growing number of cloud applications available for organizations to take advantage of, as well as general maturation of cloud computing processes, Network Computing reports.

According to Forbes, email and web services were the most commonly cited applications organizations have moved or will move to the cloud, followed closely by storage and collaboration solutions, which include web conferencing and instant messaging. When asked which application they would move to the cloud if limited to one option, 25 percent chose storage, making it the most popular selection.

A new survey has found a lack of confidence in disaster recovery plans for businesses in the industrial sector.

The survey, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, included more than 6,000 IT practitioners from organizations with fewer than 6,000 employees. It found that only 53 percent of respondents from the industrial sector, including representatives from construction firms and manufacturing companies, feel confident that they would be able to recover quickly from a disaster.

When asked to identify the biggest challenges to data recovery, 45 percent of participants cited a lack of IT resources and insufficient budgets. Perhaps most surprisingly, more than a tenth of survey respondents indicated that their organizations spend no money on disaster recovery or backup practices.

Experts widely agree that planning is critical for businesses to recover successfully and quickly from disaster. Specifically, many recommend that organizations consider investing in cloud services to improve their backup capabilities. Data stored in the cloud remains protected even if a business' physical location is destroyed, and can be accessed from any location.

A new study has found that IT spending is increasing among small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and cloud services are receiving a growing portion of these expenditures.

The study, conducted by Spiceworks, revealed that overall IT budgets increased 15 percent from the previous year among organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees. It also found that use of cloud services and virtualization is increasing. Forty-eight percent of respondents indicated that they used cloud services in their businesses, a significant increase from the 28 percent who did so in 2011. Additionally, 14 percent indicated they intend to adopt cloud services before the end of 2012.

Virtualization saw a smaller but still sizable increase, from 54 percent usage in 2011 to 64 percent in 2012.

As usual, hardware received the greatest percentage of IT departments' budgets, at 40 percent. However, last year, IT teams spent 47 percent of their budgets on hardware. Adam Weinroth explained this drop: "As there's more of a move to cloud and virtualization capabilities, those often come in the form of services, and there's less [on-premises] hardware required to run those services," InformationWeek reports.

Disaster preparation is a serious issue for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While large corporations typically have the manpower and financial resources to overcome a major disaster, the same is often not true for SMBs. In their early years, SMBs typically struggle to establish themselves and maintain sufficient operating capital. When disaster strikes, it is common for an SMB to never reopen. 

That is why small business expert Raymon Ray recently argued in Business Insider that SMBs should invest in the cloud to improve their ability to recover from disasters. With a cloud-based backup solution in place, he writes, a SMB's data becomes available from any location. This means that even if the business' physical location is inoperable, employees can continue to access the network and perform their jobs.

Bloomberg Businessweek also highlighted the value of the cloud for disaster recovery. According to Jeff Echols, data stored in the cloud is inherently off-site, and protected, in the event of a local disaster, meaning there will almost certainly not be any data loss.

For many organizations, the concept of the cloud is unnerving. Businesses worry that data stored on another company's cloud servers is vulnerable. They prefer to keep all of their information on their own servers, believing this option to be more secure.

Greg Simpson, writing for The ABC, recently argued that this belief is a myth. Cloud services, he argued, are not any more inherently insecure than legacy infrastructures.

However, he did not claim that the cloud automatically offers users security, either. Rather, he recommended that businesses considering a move to the cloud choose a professional, high-quality cloud service provider that can offer assistance to ensure the transition is safe and secure. Similarly, he advised businesses to choose a data center equipped with top-grade physical and cybersecurity.

It is important for businesses to remember that not all cloud service providers are equal. Some are much more hands-on regarding data security than others. As with any other significant investment, organizations should perform research and consider options before choosing a cloud vendor.