What are the barriers to moving legacy data to the cloud?

While 95% of tech leaders worldwide say moving their legacy application data to the cloud is a priority, and 80.5% want to do it within the next 12 months, only 35% of tech leaders currently store more than half their legacy data in the cloud.

On a related note, only 58% say more than half of their SaaS vendors meet all their security requirements. Given the increased availability of cloud infrastructures over the past decade, these numbers suggest that many organizations continue to have serious concerns about cloud deployments, and are still approaching the issue of cloud migration very cautiously.

These are among the results that emerge from a Archive360 and Pulse survey. It’s clear that despite the constant innovation associated with cloud computing, many long-standing concerns about security and compliance, particularly regarding SaaS providers, remain in place.

“We’ve long heard that most enterprises would like to manage their legacy data, including data that’s potentially sensitive, in the cloud, but that doesn’t seem to have translated into full-fledged cloud adoption and data migration,” said Archive360 CTO Tibi Popp.

“The obvious benefits of such a move must still be balanced with potential fears, in part because many technologies deployed by SaaS providers were created in on-premises environments and can’t deal with emerging security and compliance priorities. It’s clearer than ever that we will never be able to take full advantage of cloud architectures until a new generation of technologies is adopted.”

Once you get all legacy data into the cloud, not all problems go away

The report features responses from 200 IT professionals about their cloud migration strategies, and how well SaaS vendors are meeting their needs. Most of the respondents describe problems with some requirements; for example, 37% acknowledge making a security policy exception for one or more of their SaaS-based vendors (for the record, this figure has dropped since a similar survey in 2019). Also, 27.5% say their data is stored by a SaaS-based vendor that has been involved in a cyberattack, and more than 10% don’t know if their vendor was involved in such an attack.

Looking ahead to what they want but don’t have, almost all the tech leaders surveyed, 96.5%, will require more customization of security protocols running outside their data storage solution. These concerns offer further proof that many SaaS products continue to depend on security models more to protect infrastructure than information.

Once an organization does get its data into the cloud, not all problems go away. The survey reveals that only 3% are actively managing more than 75% of that data, despite benefits that range from managing risks, reducing costs (storage, e-discovery) to enhancing productivity and helping users at every level make better and safer decisions. Clearly, many organizations are only now beginning to take advantage of the information management capabilities the cloud has to offer.

The top three barriers to moving legacy app data to the cloud are:

• Concerns around data regulations and compliance, including global privacy regulations: 60%
• Concerns around infrastructure and information security: 55%
• Unsure of budget requirements for cloud adoption, i.e., total cost of ownership and cloud adoption ROI: 51%.