(Andy Moon, TechRepublic) A new survey found that only 8% of businesses (small, medium, and enterprise) have any current plans to utilize cloud storage and only 3% are using it now. These results suggest that, while there is a lot of potential for cloud storage, concerns about privacy, security, and pricing are keeping most companies from moving data out of their data centers, at least as a primary storage option.

Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman writes in the report that “there is long-term potential for storage-as-a-service, but Forrester sees issues with guaranteed service levels, security, chain of custody, shared tenancy, and long-term pricing as significant barriers that still need to be addressed before it takes off in any meaningful way.”

One interesting finding of the survey is that companies are more interested in the cloud for back-up storage rather than general purpose storage, which requires a much smaller leap of faith and is far easier to implement than remote primary storage.