IT executives in companies are getting more comfortable with cloud computing, according to a recent poll by chip-designer AMD. The new study found that despite security and reliability concerns associated to cloud computing these days, a growing number of companies are adopting the medium for various uses.

The AMD survey included IT decision-makers at 1,513 companies with 100 or more employees. The survey conducted in March involved 1,000 respondents from the US, 259 from Asia (China, India, and Singapore), and 254 from Europe (the UK, France, and Germany).

About 37 per cent of the firms in all regions said that they were already running at least some of their applications in a cloud and 42 per cent of private companies are doing something on public, private, or hybrid clouds.

Just three 3 per cent they would not use the medium. Another 23 per cent said they are not considering clouds for their IT apps or data. About one third more said they are now looking into the could computing. About 19 per cent said they are moving some of their workloads to cloud computing for saving costs while 35 per cent said they are only opting for the medium as a tactical move for data backup or rapid deployment of development and test environments.

About half of the respondents who put their data, apps, or both onto clouds believe that this is a strategic move for the company’s IT policy. John Fruehe, director of marketing for server and workstation products at AMD said, "This feels an awful lot like server virtualization did at the beginning of the last decade. Once they get their feet wet, they jump into the rest of the pool."