Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have such powerful influence that they’re the key driver in most enterprise migrations to the cloud, a new study from Unisys Corp. has found.

Unisys quizzed more than 200 U.S.-based IT and business executives for its study, and found that 72 percent said the CIO is the primary driver of their company’s cloud migration. Other executives in the C-suite ranked much lower than CIOs, with just 6 percent saying the CEO was the primary driver for cloud adoption, and three percent saying the Chief Financial Officer was behind the push.

As for why companies are moving to the cloud, most survey respondents cited cost savings (63 percent) and faster access to compute capacity (62 percent) as the primary reasons. In addition, the need to replace end-of-life technology was cited by 44 percent of respondents as a reason to migrate to the cloud.

Mildly surprising is the news that Microsoft Azure is the most popular public cloud among those surveyed, cited by 46 percent of respondents. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen by just 42 percent, while some 21 percent of respondents said they had not yet moved any workloads to the cloud. Microsoft also came out on top as the most prominent systems management solution among IT and business execs, with 54 percent indicating they rely on Microsoft Systems Center for IT, compared to just 22 percent who use the second-most popular platform, HP OpenView.

Despite all the fuss about cloud-based apps, Unisys’ survey shows that these are still the exception to the norm. Most firms still keep the majority of their business apps on premises, especially when it comes to “mission critical” apps (78 percent) and storage apps (67 percent).

Nonetheless, the survey reveals that the migration to the cloud is well underway. Some 67 percent of business and IT execs surveyed said at least half of their IT resources will be cloud-based within two years, while 44 percent say more than 75 percent will reside in the cloud by 2018.

“This study shows that far-sighted CIOs have a clear view of the competitive, operational and economic benefits of cloud computing, and are taking energetic action to realize them for their organizations,” said Steve Nunn, vice president of Cloud and Infrastructure Services at Unisys, in a statement. “At the same time, those decision-makers are clear-eyed about the need to secure both existing IT and new cloud resources in order to protect vital business assets.”

That’s evidenced by Unisys’ finding that security is still one of the most challenging aspects of cloud management, cited by 42 percent of all respondents.

Photo Credit: mohanrajdurairaj via Compfight cc