The flexibility of cloud computing could help organizations recover from the current global economic downturn, according to 68 percent of IT and businesses decision makers who participated in an annual study commissioned by Savvis, Inc., a provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises.

Vanson Bourne, an international research firm, surveyed more than 600 IT and business decision makers across the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore, revealing an underlying pressure to do more with less budget (the biggest issue facing organizations, cited by 54 percent of respondents) and demand for lower cost, more flexible IT provisioning.

The study, in its second year, reveals that IT decision makers are confident in cloud computing's ability to deliver budget savings. Commercial and public sector respondents predict cloud use will decrease IT budgets by an average of 15 percent, with some respondents expecting savings of more than 40 percent.

"Flexibility and pay-as-you-go elasticity are driving many of our clients toward cloud computing," said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at Savvis. "However, it's important, especially for our large enterprise clients, to work with an IT provider that not only delivers cost savings, but also tightly integrates technologies, applications and infrastructure on a global scale."

A lack of access to IT capacity is clearly identified as a barrier to business progress, with 76 percent of business decision makers reporting they have been prevented from developing or piloting projects due to the cost or constraints within IT. For 55 percent of respondents, this remains an issue.