Earlier this summer our technology forum surveyed heads of IT in further and higher education to find out more about the state of cloud adoption. It was quite a mixed picture - whilst 45% of respondees were using cloud services for business applications such as payroll processing, 31% had no plans to move to cloud for these applications. It was clear from the survey that many people were discouraged from using public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure because of a perception that costs would be difficult to anticipate and contain. 61% of respondents said that financial issues were a major concern for them. We thought it was timely to do some further work in this area, and have just released a report exploring the future and potential of cloud computing for our community.