Cloud computing is crucial to new growth role for IT

Chief Information Officers across the world are making cloud computing and other internet-based services their top technology priorities for 2011 in order to release resources to fund innovation and growth.

That is the finding of a global survey of more than 2,000 CIOs by leading IT research and advisory company Gartner.

It shows that businesses are increasingly looking to IT to play a key role in driving growth, in addition to helping cut costs and improve processes.

So there is a new agenda for CIOs in 2011, according to Gartner, and it will be enabled by the introduction of new lower-cost technologies such as cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS) and social networks.

Currently 3% of CIOs have most of their IT running in the cloud of on SaaS technologies but that figure is expected to rise to 43% over the next four years. The money saved will be redirected to fund infrastructure changes and new projects designed to generate growth.

The table below shows the top 10 business and Technology priorities from the survey.

Source: Gartner EXP 2011