Are CIOs and top IT executives hopping on the cloud bandwagon even more enthusiastically than their IT staffs? That appears to be what one of the latest surveys about cloud attitudes reveals.

In the survey, summarized in a CIO.com article, 92 percent of responding top IT decision makers (CIOs and other top IT execs) said they believe cloud technology is good for business. That's an impressive result, but even more so when you see that the same attitude was shared by just 81 percent of IT managers. In our experience, the CIOs usually require convincing by their managers and staffs when it comes to the newest technology approaches, so this is an interesting finding.

This survey of 348 CIOs and IT professionals also found that two out of three CIOs (67 percent) see the cloud delivering better systems at a lower cost and that nearly as many (62 percent) see cloud technology giving the various business stakeholders more ownership of their key applications.

The enthusiasm about the cloud is also notable in light of the fact that only about a third (31 percent) of the CIOs say their infrastructures are primarily cloud-based at this time. Clearly, an awful lot of CIOs are seeing greener grass on the other side of the fence. At the same time, they are recognizing the challenges that the cloud may pose for them; 69 percent saw their most pressing cloud issue as integration of data among applications, while the issues of determining where data resides and developing workflows came in at 39 and 34 percent respectively.

The study didn't deal with security as a cloud challenge, apparently taking those concerns as a given when it comes to both the cloud provider and the network infrastructure. We agree that they're a given, but we can't help but wonder how the results might have been different if the CIOs and IT staffers had been asked directly about it. We presume they factored it in, but can't be sure.

It is very encouraging for cloud evangelists like us to get affirmation of what we have been preaching for the last 16 months. Finally, more than two thirds of the top IT decision makers are finding the cloud is providing better value and I am sure the rest will be reaching the same conclusion in the next 12 months. You can read more of our thoughts about the cloud, such as these posts: Beefing Up the Cloud, Why Clouds Reduce IT costs, as well as Enterprises Seeing Through the Clouds in 2012.