The final installment of Cisco Connected World Report has finally arrived, highlighting the increasing role of data centers, security and mobile information access as top IT trends worldwide. This study was carried out in 13 major countries of the world and finds out the behavioral trends of IT professionals.

A major finding of the study suggests that most of the IT professionals worldwide predict the widespread private and public cloud adoption. It also finds that they are creating new job opportunities with the help of increased data collaboration in the data center, liberally adopting cloud computing and other new technologies.

Some of the major cloud computing statistics that came out from the study are as following:

• 52% of IT professionals use/plan to use cloud computing.
• While only 18 per cent of respondents are using cloud computing today, 34 per cent plan to use it soon.
• 70% of Brazilian, 69% Chinese and 76% Indian IT professionals are using/keen on using could computing and higher cloud adoption rates.
• Top cloud users include Brazil (27%), Germany (27%), India (26%), U.S. (23%) and Mexico (22%).
• 88 per cent of respond predict themselves using cloud computing techniques in the next three years.

See what Lew Tucker, Cisco’s chief technology officer, cloud computing has to say about this:

“The data center is evolving to meet employee expectations for accessing networks, applications and information anywhere at any time with any device. The third installment of the Cisco Connected World Report demonstrates that IT professionals worldwide are embracing new technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, desktop virtualization, and unified data center infrastructure to meet employee expectations while helping their companies meet their businesses goals.”

Some other important findings about data center trends and virtualization trends are as following:

• The top four data center priorities for the next 3 years include improving speed and agility in applications deployment (33%), better resource management for demand and capacity alignment (31%), increasing data center resilience (19%) and reducing costs (17%).
• 40 per cent of IT professionals expect data center cost reduction by 25%-49% due to virtualization. They also expect from 50% to 100% of production environment servers to go virtual in the next three years.

A few days back, we also read about the Cisco Visual Networking Index Usage Research digging deep into effects of visual networking like videos, social networking and advanced collaboration applications. You can study the entire coverage right here.