It's not the business leaders or the rank employees either. While all of these choice make sense and all are, according to our Forrights surveys, more excited by it than infrastructure & operations professionals, it's the person who supposedly has the most to gain from it — your CFO.

One of the things that truly differentiates Forrester Research from other analyst firms is the breadth of conversations we have with clients and the range of employees in an enterprise that we survey. We serve not only those in IT roles across the world but those in marketing, sales and strategy roles too. And our Forrsights surveys complete the picture by talking with CFOs, CEOs, workplace professionals and of course consumers. This breadth gives us the ability to present 360-degree views on certain key topics such as mobility and cloud computing. And it is through this holistic view that you get a real psychograph of the enterprise and can examine and respond to these differences in opinion and consumption. 

When a market disruption as large as cloud computing comes along, it sends ripples throughout your organization, so it should come as no surprise that attitudes toward this technology vary widely, depending on the role of the staff member. Knowing how each role in your organization feels about cloud computing will affect your cloud strategy, and being mindful of the attitudes they bring to your efforts could be the difference between a successful implementation and a catastrophic failure. Forrester data shows that the CFO and business leaders are the most positive on the use of this technology and are enabling (encouraging) developers to leverage cloud services without I&O consent. The CFO sees big potential cost savings and loves the flexible operating expenses of pay per use platforms. Business leaders just want to get new solutions to market and see clouds as a fast path to productivity.

IT roles show much more hesitation but the reasoning differs by role. Sourcing and vendor management pros don't know how to deal with take-it-or-leave-it cloud service contracts. Security and risk professionals fear the unknown. Our latest Forrester report, published yesterday, presents this 360-degree view of the data we have collected in our Forrsights surveys about cloud computing plus insight into each role's attitudes toward it, and what you should know and do about these different attitudes.

Who is the most cloud-enthused in your company? Do you know why? What are you doing to engage them?