The vast majority of organizations (87%) are concerned with the security and privacy of corporate data in cloud deployments, a global survey of IT executives shows.
The survey, titled “Preparing for next-generation cloud: Lessons learned and insights shared”, was conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by Hitachi Data systems.
Responses also indicated that outages and failures of public cloud implementations were twice as likely to occur when compared to private cloud. Almost half of the respondents indicated the biggest risk of a failed implementation to be loss of customer data.
The report found that while cloud computing has delivered many benefits, cloud adoption also continues to challenge even the most nimble of companies.
The survey shows that 67% of respondents have suffered some type of incident or issue related to their cloud computing implementation. Of the respondents experiencing an incident, 9% indicated it as being “high damage”, while 55% indicated the damage as being “limited” and 34% “medium.”
Some 46% of respondents consider “loss of customer data” as the biggest risk to their organization of a failed cloud implementation, followed by loss of revenue (40%) and breach of customer privacy (36%).
One in four who experienced a cloud incident cite a "prolonged failure to integrate" with the public cloud as a problem. A majority (36%) cited a technical error on the part of their own organization as being a primary cause of the incident.
By gathering lessons learned from cloud implementations of the survey’s respondents, the 2015 Economist Intelligence Unit report identified five best practices that can help organizations make the most of their cloud opportunities.
These include:
- Ensure cloud providers can meet corporate business and IT requirements.
- Choose the right cloud service for greater control over security and data protection.
- Use cloud architectures that enable connections from cloud services to existing IT infrastructure.
- Consider factors beyond costs, such as cloud’s potential to improve business operations and boost innovation and employee efficiency.
- Define business requirements for IT to offer cloud services and act as cloud brokers.