INTELLIGENT CLOUD
never group, and government 33 %, education 31 %, and services 33 % leaders of the- within 5 years, group. These responses are all arguably due to concerns about the scarcity of skilled IT staff to implement and maintain their private cloud.
The telecommunications industry ranked the scarcity of IT staff skills similarly high, yet they are leading the transformation to software-defined datacentre. Currently an average of 52 % of an organisation’ s datacentre servers are now virtualised.
The shift to software defined datacenters is slowest at largest organisations, with 10 % of those stating no plans to fully transform, and 29 % expecting it to take up to five years.
Unauthorised access top concern for private clouds Private cloud users listed unauthorised access to sensitive data as their top concern, with concern about staff security skills a very close second. The time and effort involved in implementation and maintenance also made the list. The majority of the concerns are related to security operations, including maintaining compliance, identity and access management, dealing with advanced threats, insufficient visibility, and consistent controls. New virtualisation technologies, such as containers, are putting additional pressure on the IT departments’ resources and skill sets.
An average of 52 % of an organisation’ s datacentre servers are now virtualised.
organisations are not monitoring Shadow IT usage, down from 5 % last year.
27 % respondents blocking Shadow IT IT departments are taking a variety of steps to secure Shadow services in use. Blocking access to unauthorised services is the top choice, but only 27 % of organisations are taking this action. Most appear to be striving to support the department’ s choice of service with measures such as identity and access management, DLP and encryption, or working with the users to find an acceptable solution. Interesting to note, while 22 % have experienced a data breach with their cloud services, only 24 % are using DLP and encryption to protect the data, with almost no correlation between the two.
Only 4 % respondents have full softwaredefined datacentre In order to move to a hybrid private-public cloud architecture, the datacentre has to evolve to a highly-virtualised, cloud-based infrastructure. Very few organisations are there yet, with only 4 % reporting a fully software-defined datacentre. However, the majority 73 % expect to complete their transformation to software-defined datacentre within 24 months, while 20 % expect it to be complete within 5 years. Only 7 % indicate that they never plan to fully transform to software-defined datacentre.
The shift is happening slowest at the largest organisations, with 10 % of those stating no plans to fully transform, and 29 % expecting it to take up to five years. Government 19 % and utilities 14 % are the leaders of the- No,
( 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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