A new study by IDC Manufacturing Insights found that European manufacturers are investing more heavily in cloud servers to enhance agility and collaborate more effectively with partners. The survey revealed that nearly two-thirds of respondents have allocated part of their budget for the cloud and none expect to reduce spending on the cloud over the next three years.

According to a recent report by IDG Enterprise, decision-makers admit to spending one-third of their total IT budget on the cloud and more than half said they plan on upping these investments within the next year.

"Manufacturers today are struggling to compete in complex and hyper-competitive global markets, but leading manufacturers are those that see IT as a competitive differentiator, have created IT organizations that understand business needs and pragmatically invest with business acumen," said Pierfrancesco Manenti of IDC Manufacturing Insights.

IDC noted that there are still concerns regarding the cloud, including security and availability, but these worries are being outweighed by the superior benefits cloud computing offers businesses. Instead of fearing the cloud, decision-makers are slowly migrating sensitive solutions to hosted environments to become more familiar with the technology.