Cloud benefits clear to most

• Of respondents using the cloud today, 40% of their infrastructure is already in the public cloud, and they expect to increase this to almost 70% within five years.
• All (99%) said that their organisations have seen benefits as a result of moving to the public cloud.
• Nearly all (91%) reported they had concerns over their use of public cloud, with 54% stating that cyberattacks are their chief concern.

Source: Barracuda Networks infographic. Cloud adoption today.

Barracuda Networks, a provider of cloud-enabled security and data protection solutions, has announced findings from a new global research report, Unlocking the Benefits of Public Cloud. Commissioned by Barracuda and conducted by Vanson Bourne, the research surveyed 1,300 IT decision makers from organisations using public cloud infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) from the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and from Asia Pacific (APAC).

Of the 450 APAC IT decision makers who participated in the survey, 150 of them were from ASEAN countries Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. The report outlines the respondents’ use of public cloud, benefits of public cloud, challenges with public cloud, and public cloud security.

“This report highlights the ongoing increase in public cloud use globally, with many organisations seeing substantial process and financial benefits. However, there are still a significant number of organisations that are not clear on the shared security model and the implication to their data and applications,” said Senior VP and GM of Security at Barracuda, Hatem Naguib. The challenges in migrating legacy security appliances and architectures require having the right infrastructure for securing hybrid cloud solutions. Organisations need to select cloud-ready security solutions that are designed for the new architectures and capabilities enabled by public and hybrid cloud adoption.”

Respondents’ use of public cloud is on the rise, as is their sophistication in working within the cloud. On average, organisations have nearly 40% of their infrastructure in the public cloud today, with the expectation to increase this to 70% over the next five years. Four in 10 reported that their organisation relied on public cloud deployments to expand their services, often replicating those over multiple regions, while 30% said they only migrated selected services to the cloud and kept the balance on premises. Overall, the survey found that organisations are growing more comfortable with hybrid environments that deploy a range of public cloud services along with more traditional on-premises infrastructure.

Nearly all the respondents (99%) said that their organisations has seen benefits as a result of moving to the public cloud, including greater scalability and reduced IT expenditures. The survey found, on average, that organisations didn’t use a single cloud provider for everything, and cited a number of reasons for this: Top of mind was that different providers had different strengths (63%), followed by the view that this increased security (51%) and helped keep costs down (42%).

Security remains to be the biggest challenge when it comes to using the public cloud – 71% felt that security concerns restricted their ability to migrate workloads to the public cloud. Nine in 10 (91%) of organisations reported they worried about their use of public cloud, with cyberattacks being the chief concern at 54%. Phishing (50%), distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks (47%), advanced persistent threats (APTs) (45%), and ransomware (41%) were the main threats that most concerned them.

Over half (56%) had experienced at least one cyberattack, and the average number of attacks an organisation had seen were five. The challenge with security was further heightened with the information organisations are storing in public clouds: Over half of all organisations store some type of sensitive data (personnel records, medical records, etc.) in the public cloud, and nearly the same number (55%) store customer order histories.

The shared responsibility security model – wherein cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, while organisations using the cloud are responsible for the security of what they put in the cloud – is not new, and 72% felt they fully understood their cloud security responsibilities. Despite this, organisations said they believed their cloud provider was responsible to provide for security – 71% felt the cloud provider was responsible for customer data in the public cloud, and 66% for applications in the public cloud. Additionally, 52% were confident that their move to the cloud was secure, with three in five – 62% – responding that they had included additional security solutions in their public cloud infrastructure.

Barracuda Networks advises customers to look for third parties which support a wide range of ecosystems with the same or similar solutions as when they go onto the cloud to simplify management across platforms. This is because organisations often end up with multiple cloud providers, as well as maintaining on-premises (legacy) infrastructure. This can have implications on complexity and overall costs; it is further compounded when third-party solutions such as security are added to the mix, Barracuda Networks said.

Interested?

View the report

Check out the Public Cloud Usage by the Numbers infographic

posted from Bloggeroid