Worries over security are severely hampering the adoption of cloud computing services, according a recent analyst report.

Research firm Forrester said that a recent survey revealed that roughly half of all companies, from small businesses to large enterprises, cited security worries as the primary reason for not adopting cloud services.

Security concerns have long been one of the biggest issues with cloud services. The enterprise and government sectors have both expressed concerns about putting corporate data in the hands of third parties and remotely-accessed systems, while security experts have made cloud security a hot topic.

The cloud security sector itself has also grown as vendors seek to offer services and best practice guidelines to help improve data security on cloud platforms.

The Forrester study was performed as part of the firm's larger report on the state of emerging business hardware.

Analysts noted that, while cloud adoption is being hampered, technologies such as virtualisation and energy management are seeing healthy growth and giving hope for an economic rebound in the IT space as a whole in the coming year.

"Despite the hesitancy about cloud computing, virtualisation remains a top priority for hardware technology decision-makers, driven by their objectives of improving IT infrastructure manageability, total cost of ownership, business continuity and, to a lesser extent, their increased focus on energy efficiency, " said Forrester senior analyst Tim Harmon.