We know full well why many organizations are avoiding public cloud -- they're nervous about security. However, seasoned cloud adopters that have locked down their security have another concern on their plate -- the performance of their cloud services. Never mind the security of big data -- can cloud providers even handle big data?
That's the key takeaway of a recent survey of 250 technology executives conducted by Internap Network Services. The survey authors separated out the "cloud-wise" organizations that are currently using cloud services from the "cloud-wary" organizations that are not using cloud services and have no near-term plans to do so.
The survey shows that once companies gain experience with public cloud offerings, their security concerns diminish dramatically. A majority of the cloud-wary (40%) cited cloud security as a concern, whereas only 15% of the cloud-wise cited security as a challenge they’ve encountered.
However, seasoned cloud users have other concerns on their plates. Twenty-two percent of cloud users are hosting or considering hosting "big data as a service" in the cloud. However a majority of this group (59%) says they are running into performance issues.
As the report's authors put it:
"Rising demand for real-time customer insights and targeting, as well as the growth of mobility, are driving the development of a new generation of fast, big data applications that are making the constraints of traditional, virtualized public cloud more evident. These applications require cloud infrastructure that can cost-effectively scale on demand while ensuring the predictable, high performance needed to instantly ingest, store and analyze data from billions of transactions."
Of course, the survey's sponsor -- a provider of Internet infrastructure services -- has a horse in this race. Nonetheless, in the race to capitalize on big data analytics, companies are bumping into limits ingesting hundreds of terabytes, or petabytes of data -- and attempting to store and back it up. How will a company with a modest budget replicate and store a secondary copy of a petabytes' worth of data? There simply isn't room or budget for localized server farms and storage arrays to support all the cool things executives want to do with data -- such as capturing detail data on customer preferences, or looking at all the data coming in from sensors. Even the "cloud wise" are wary about the ability of their cloud providers to fill the gap -- at least for now.
