IT professionals believe their data is safer in the cloud than on-premise

Nearly seven in 10 executives and over half of IT professionals revealed that they would prefer having a single cloud services provider handling their varied hosted deployments, according to Evolve IP.

The survey also revealed that for the second consecutive year IT professionals and executives believe that when facing hardware malfunctions, malicious attacks and environmental disasters, their organization’s data is safer in the cloud than on-premises. The survey of more than 1,500 professionals, which provides current cloud adoption trends and future cloud deployment insights, also revealed that just under nine in 10 organizations plan to move new or additional services to the cloud in the next three years.

Cloud sprawl

Cloud sprawl, which takes place when multiple people and or departments deploy disparate hosted services, has firmly taken hold in many organizations with survey recipients indicating that their business had, on average, over 4 major cloud services in the cloud today – not including a breakout of specific SaaS applications.

Additionally, 88 percent planned on moving more services to the cloud over the next three years including Microsoft applications, call centers and phone systems. The growth and sprawl has left executives and IT professionals feeling out of control and desiring consolidation. As a result, 68 percent of executives and 52 percent of IT professionals now desire having a single cloud services provider for their various cloud services.

Data security

Data security also continued to be an ongoing concern, noted by 50.5 percent of respondents. This year’s survey again asked where executives and IT professionals felt their data was safest under three common risk scenarios: environmental disasters, malicious attacks (e.g. cyberattacks) and hardware failure.

• For hardware malfunctions, the most common scenario for disaster recovery, 49 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 33 percent in a public cloud and 18 percent on-premises.
• For malicious attacks, 51 percent preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data versus 34.5 percent on-premises and 14.5 percent in a public cloud.
• For environmental disasters – 49.5 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 40.5 percent in a public cloud and 10 percent on-premises.

Additional findings

• Network costs were noted as a pain point by 1 in 3 survey takers (32 percent) yet nearly half of respondents were unfamiliar with SD-WAN technology. Only 1 in 10 have deployed SD-WAN for their headquarters or a branch location.
• Budget increases for 2017 were expected by 48 percent of respondents and 37 percent felt that a lack of budget would be a barrier to deployment; a 7 point increase over 2016.
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) was just the 4th expected benefit of moving to the cloud noted by 60 percent of respondents. Scalability, flexibility and disaster avoidance/recovery/continuity ranked higher at 75 percent, 70.5 percent and 70 percent respectively
• Over 1 in 4 respondents (27.5 percent) expect to move their phone system to the cloud in the next three years and 1 in 5 plan on implementing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) in the same period.