For all the buzz about Linux containers, production deployments remain few and far between, and there’s no shortage of surveys and studies attempting to identify the biggest barriers to adoption.

Red Hat Inc. is the latest tech firm to churn out a Docker survey, saying that lingering concerns around certification and security continue to be a stumbling block. Its findings echo the same sentiments as a ClusterHQ inc. survey released last week, which also found that security, data management and networking issues are obstacles in container technology’s path.

According to Red Hat’s survey of almost 400 IT professionals, two-thirds of these are planning to rollout Linux containers in production within the next two years. Of those, 83 percent will rollout their deployments in virtual environments. It’s a strategy that Red Hat says underlines the growing recognition of “the benefits of using containers and virtualization together, rather than one or the other.”

Of those planning deployments, 44 percent responded that they see containers as a tool for consolidating their existing data center servers.

But even with all this enthusiasm for containers, some 60 percent of IT experts said they had concerns about Linux container security, together with certification and image provenance, or origin. Security worries are part and parcel of virtually every new technology, but with Linux containers the issue is becoming a paramount concern.

There are other, more practical problems too. For example, 58 percent of Red Hat survey respondents said that integrating Linux containers with existing deployment tools and processes is a big barried to adoption. Meanwhile, another 55 percent cited data management issued, while over fifty percent said a lack of skills was another big barrier to adoption.

Of those who’re planning to rollout containers in the next two years, about half of these said the plan was to use container-based apps in cloud deployments, while 56 percent said they want to use containers as vehicles for e-commerce and web software.

The survey comes after Red Hat rolled out a certified ecosystem for Linux containers based on Docker last March in an effort to address some of these adoption barriers. That framework certifies the deployment of secure application containers via industry standards like the Docker Engine and Docker container format, in order to address some of these concerns. The Docker Engine is the runtime at the core of Docker used to build and run containers.

The issues of security, certification, support and other barriers to adoption are all expected to be addressed at the DockerCon conference in San Francisco that kicks off today.

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