Techaisle, an IT market research and consulting company, recently released the results of a survey showing that among SMBs, awareness of Private Clouds is 62 percent, which is actually higher than awareness of Public and Hybrid Clouds. However, given a choice, 44 percent of SMB decision makers said they prefer to use Public Clouds as opposed to Private and Hybrid Clouds, due mainly to the strain on internal resources posed by the latter two. The survey was conducted among companies in the US, UK, Germany and Brazil.

In a release, Anurag Agrawal of Techaisle said that as cloud computing vendors are pushing private clouds for enterprises, the same messaging seems to be trickling down to the SMBs and there is a greater awareness about Private Clouds. He said SMBs' concern for security, data privacy, and lack of control in using Public Cloud Computing is adding to the awareness of Private Clouds -- however the preference of Public Clouds among SMBs comes from the lower cost of setup, scalability and less demand on resources.

While the awareness of Hybrid Clouds is 43 percent among SMBs, only 21 percent prefer to use this form of Cloud. The survey reveals that a higher percentage of mid-market businesses are adopting Hybrid Clouds as compared to small businesses.

Both Private and Hybrid Clouds require presence of IT staff, and only a small percentage of SMBs have available IT staff for this type of network administration. The usage of Cloud services such as IaaS/PaaS varies by employee size. Among those SMBs that are using Cloud Computing, 37 percent are using IaaS/PaaS Cloud, and 31 percent are using CaaS.

Mid size companies appear to have greater clarity with regards to the reasons for adopting Cloud Services. Public IaaS is predominant for all size categories but is markedly higher for the 1-49 employee category. The sweet spot for vendors targeting Public CaaS services is the 1-19 employee category.

Overall, the top reasons for adopting Cloud services by SMBs is faster deployment time and allowing IT staff to focus on more important business needs.

As far as small businesses go, Techaisle recently revealed that a surprisingly low percentage of small business owners in these countries are aware of what cloud computing is.