Nearly 60 percent of European businesses are worried about the security of cloud computing, something that will make the advocates of the technology a little worried.

While cloud computing is being seen by the leading IT outfits such as Microsoft, IBM and HP as the cure for cancer, a new report, compiled by AMD says that businesses don't trust it. Research carried out by AMD show that  42 per cent of businesses, which are considering deploying cloud offerings, are doing it to reduce IT costs. A third of those which have cloud accounts store more than $250,000 worth of data in the cloud, according to a global cloud computing research study by AMD.

However 59 per cent of businesses see security as the primary risk of cloud computing. A third are worried about the reliability of their Internet connection as a risk. While Europeans are more cautous about Cloud computing, that is not the case in the Asia-Pacific region where 67 per cent of businesses that have moved to the cloud are already seeing business value.

Over half of those businesses in the Asia-Pacific area believe increased efficiency as one of the greatest benefits of cloud computing, more so than hardware cost savings or scalability. Most of them are using the cloud for finance and accounting applications with 57 per cent of respondents indicating they are already hosting these apps in a cloud environment.

AMD server and embedded divisions vice-president and general manager Patrick Patla said different parts of the world had different cloud challenges.