Trust now outnumbers distrust for public clouds by more than 2-to-1.
A new report released by Intel has outlined the current state of cloud adoption, its security implications and the evolving impact of Shadow IT. The second annual “Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky” report also looked at the primary concerns with private and public cloud services.
“The ‘Cloud First’ strategy is now well and truly ensconced into the architecture of many organisations across the world,” said Raj Samani, EMEA chief technology officer, Intel Security. “The desire to move quickly toward cloud computing appears to be on the agenda for most organisations. This year, the average time before respondents thought their IT budgets would be 80 percent cloud-based was 15 months, indicating that Cloud First for many companies is progressing and remains the objective.”
As trust in the cloud grows, most organisations now view cloud services as or more secure than private clouds, and more likely to deliver lower costs of ownership and overall data visibility. Those who trust public clouds now outnumber those who distrust public clouds by more than 2-to-1. Improved trust and perception, as well as increased understanding of the risks by senior management, is encouraging more organisations to store sensitive data in the public cloud.
Risks Also Rise
The ongoing shortage of security skills is continuing to affect cloud deployments. Almost half of the organisations surveyed report the lack of cyber security skills has slowed adoption or usage of cloud services, possibly contributing to the increase in Shadow IT activities. Another 36 percent report they are experiencing a scarcity but are continuing with their cloud activities regardless. Only 15 percent of those surveyed state they do not have a skills shortage.
Due to the ease of procurement, almost 40 percent of cloud services are now commissioned without the involvement of IT, and unfortunately, visibility of these Shadow IT services has dropped from about 50 percent last year to just under 47 percent this year. As a result, 65 percent of IT professionals think this phenomenon is interfering with their ability to keep the cloud safe and secure. This is not surprising given the amount of sensitive data now being stored in the public cloud and more than half (52 percent) of respondents reporting they have definitively tracked malware from a cloud SaaS application.
Data Centre Progression
The number of organisations using private cloud only has dropped from 51 percent to 24 percent over the past year, while hybrid cloud use has increased from 19 percent to 57 percent. This move to a hybrid private/public cloud architecture requires the data centre to evolve to a highly virtualized, cloud-based infrastructure. On average, 52 percent of an organisation’s data centre servers are virtualized, 80 percent are using containers and most expect to have the conversion to a fully software-defined data center completed within two years.
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