Over the next five years, cloud computing is still the highest priority for investment, according to the latest piece of research from Compuware, alongside Research in Action.

16.5% of companies cite cloud as the most important area of their IT portfolio to strengthen, ahead of mobile IT (13.5%), business analytics, big data and in-memory (11.3%).

It’s not a surprise that cloud is pretty big news this year too. Cloud infrastructure (12.5%) is the top area of investment for IT in 2013. Renegotiation of outsourcing contracts (9.6%) and investing in big data and analytics (9.2%) rounded off the top three.

In terms of key tenets within the cloud computing sphere, investing in cloud for test and backup purposes is the top priority this year according to 24.1% of respondents, with private cloud implementation (17.1%) and public/hybrid investment (15%) trailing behind. Full cloud integration – be it public or hybrid – appears to be the number one long-term priority, ahead of end-to-end SLAs and quality of service.

The research also examined the most popular cloud services used today. eCommerce platforms (78%) were the most widely used according to survey respondents, well ahead of public cloud SaaS (50%) and social media (50%). Looking two years ahead, 47% of those polled intend to use hybrid cloud services, with 34% saying they will use public cloud IaaS. This may not come as a huge surprise, with plenty of sources advocating the proliferation of hybrid cloud.

Elsewhere, organisations continue to fret about combining the benefits of cloud computing – cost efficiency, agile ICT – with ensuring high level application performance in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

To that end, four in five (79%) of companies admit they worry about potential hidden costs for cloud services. This is of course something CloudTech has covered before, specifically examining unauthorised, or ‘rogue clouds’.

As enterprise mobility provider Symantec discussed, there was a link between companies using rogue clouds and losing sensitive information – hence the ‘hidden’ costs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main solution advocated was education, with platform-agnostic tools, ensuring a cloud policy focus on information and deleting duplicate data also noted.

In this instance, however, the biggest concern was poor end-user experience, due to performance bottlenecks, a damaging effect on brand reputation and revenue lost due to outages or other poor performance.

Yet the key takeaway from here was that companies expect to invest heavily in the cloud for the foreseeable future. What do you make of the research – is your company in line with these statistics?