INTELLIGENT CLOUD most common concern about using cloud services in Japan was the skills required by IT security staff.
By industry, utilisation of cloud services was lowest in government 27 % and education 19 %. This appears to be related to trust and control issues in both industries. Governments were least likely to consider their data safe within the public cloud. Educational institutions were least likely to think that the public cloud is secure from hackers. Both industries were concerned about their ability to maintain identity and access control.
By industry, use of private-only cloud was highest in engineering 30 %, primarily due to compliance concerns, and government 29 % organisations, due to trust and control issues, as mentioned above. Purely private cloud infrastructures were lowest in services companies 16 %, due to concerns over IT security skills, and media organisations 17 %, who had issues with insufficient visibility of their security posture.
Public-only usage was highest in services companies 28 %. Pure public cloud usage was lowest in insurance 9 % and retail 12 %. Retailers, not surprisingly in their price-competitive industry, were primarily concerned about costs. The top concern of insurance companies was compliance, specifically the location of cloud service providers’ datacentres and data stores outside of the country of operations.
Private-only cloud usage remained highest in the GCC including Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates 30 % and Mexico 28 %. GCC organisations were much more concerned about public cloud costs and the ability of cloud service providers to meet service level agreements than average.
Japan had the lowest usage of private clouds, at just 7 %, once again due to higher than average concerns about staff security skills.
Public-only usage remained highest in Australia 33 % and Canada 32 %. Australians were primarily concerned about the challenges of having consistent security controls integrated across both
80 % organisations now following a cloud-first strategy
traditional and virtualised infrastructures. Canadians were primarily concerned about maintaining compliance across hybrid services. Pure public cloud usage was lowest in Brazil 4 %, Mexico 8 %, and the UK 10 %. Brazilians have the highest usage of hybrid architectures, at 74 %. Mexican organisations are high private cloud users, as mentioned above. In the UK, low public cloud usage appears to be predominantly a trust issue, as they reported the lowest opinions of the public cloud’ s abilities to maintain identity and access control, and to keep their organisation’ s data safe and secure from hackers.
More than 80 % of the organisations surveyed stated that they are now following a Cloud First strategy, where priority is given to applications that can be purchased as a service or deployed in the cloud over requiring hardware and physical servers and systems to be deployed in the datacentre. Those with a Cloud First strategy believe that their IT budgets will be 80 % cloud services in less than 12 months, while those without such a strategy think it will be closer to 20 months.
The rate of cloud investment and adoption continues to be significant, but overall organisations do not seem to be getting much closer to the point where 80 % of their IT budget will be comprised of cloud services. Comparing last year’ s responses, the average number of months until they think this will happen dropped from 16 months to 15 months, indicating last year’ s respondents were overly- optimistic. Perhaps most notable, the percentage of IT professionals who stated that they do not think their IT budget will ever be 80 % cloud was cut by half, from 12 % in 2015 to just 6 % in 2016.
( Excerpted from Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky, The state of cloud adoption and security by Intel Security)
Raj Samani is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Intel Security for Europe, Middle East, Africa
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