It's almost a paradox. The number-one reason to stay away from the cloud -- security -- has also become the number-one reason to go into the cloud. Private clouds are seen as the best havens for secure data, but public cloud services are also seen as more secure than traditional on-premises systems.
A recent survey of 1,080 executives pretty much says it all: eight in 10 IT professionals and executives believe that when facing hardware malfunctions and environmental disasters, their organization’s data is safer in the cloud than with an on-premises system. In addition, six in 10 believe having data in the cloud will keep it safer from malicious attacks than maintaining data within an on-premises environment.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, says as much at a recent panel discussion. As reported by Heather Clancy in Fortune, Levie is seeing interest from corporate IT departments in cloud-based services, which keep up to date with the latest security technologies and best practices. “Many organizations are unable to keep up with the security requirements,” he said.
The survey, released by Evolve IP, found that 91 percent of all organizations now have at least one service in the cloud.
Still, the paradox continues. The top concern/barrier in moving to the cloud is security – noted by 55 percent of respondents -- essentially unchanged from previous surveys. The cloud may put data at risk, but offers greater security. For example, 50 percent of executives in the survey believe that a private cloud is safer than public clouds, or an premise data center for that matter. When asked about physical disasters (environmental or hardware failure), 55 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 28 percent in a public cloud and 18 percent on premises. When it comes to malicious attacks, 52 percent preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data, versus 38 percent on premise and 10 percent public cloud.
Faith in the cloud is on the rise in many ways. Today, about seven in 10 of executives see the value of cloud computing and consider themselves to be "believers." In a previous survey conducted in 2013, about 53 percent considered themselves to be believers. At the opposite end of the spectrum, one out of four respondents in 2013 felt that the cloud was an immature technology. Today, just one in 10 -- 12 percent -- feel the same.
On average, those surveyed have an average of four services in the cloud – up from three services in last year's survey. Servers, data centers, Exchange, Office, and disaster recovery were cited as the top deployed cloud services. Approximately three out of 10 respondents indicated that sales, marketing, operations, HR, customer support and finance all have deployed some form of cloud services. The top services respondents expect to deploy in the cloud over the next three years are servers/data centers (23 percent), phone systems (22 percent) disaster recovery (21 percent), Finance/ERP (19 percent) and co-location/backup (17 percent).
Interestingly, there’s a good chance that IT wasn’t involved in the cloud implementation process. Only about half of respondents indicated that IT was involved in another department’s decision-making process regarding using the cloud. Of course, this may have ramifications for security as well -- having departments set up their own cloud services may mean having elements falling outside of IT's domain.
