Cloud Survey Finds Improving Data Security
Despite ongoing concerns about security and privacy in the cloud, a new survey finds that cloud providers are steadily improving data security while the growing availability of private cloud services has allowed customers to specify security and data-protection measures unique to their operations.
Survey results released earlier this month by The Economist Intelligence Unit also confirm the ongoing trend toward shifting more complex IT workloads to the cloud. Rather than simply buying storage or computing capacity, cloud customers are increasingly shifting web hosting (61 percent), file storage and business applications (both at 59 percent) to the cloud.
The number of business applications running on the cloud is expected to grow as application container technology slowly enters production environments, and as vendors work to ensure potential customers that applications delivered in containers are secure.
The survey found the 55 percent of respondents cited "higher availability" as the key reason for their cloud deployments. Cost savings, workplace efficiencies and scaling were also cited. It's "cheaper and easier administratively to add capacity to the cloud," one respondent noted.
Still, among the key reasons for increased cloud adoption is improving security. "It is now possible to choose providers that meet specific security or regulatory requirements, including international requirements such as PCI-DSS [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard] for handling credit-, debit- and cash-card transactions," the survey noted.
Meanwhile, cloud vendors have also improved compliance with U.S. regulatory requirements, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in healthcare and Dodd-Frank banking regulations.
Among early cloud adopters who initially focused on public infrastructure along with software-as-a-serve, many are shifting to hybrid cloud infrastructure, in the words of one corporate CIO, as "a toolset we work with to integrate security and data management."
Cloud vendors generally pay a high public relations price for cloud outages. Interestingly, the survey found that failed cloud implementations are a bigger problem, with CIOs more often citing internal technical errors (36 percent) for cloud outages than supplier-related failures (29 percent).
Those technical errors are "exacerbated, if not caused, by a lack of skilled staff, and a lack of business-continuity and disaster-recovery planning," the report found.
Despite ongoing concerns about cloud security, a greater percentage of survey respondents said public cloud outages (23 percent) rather than data breaches (17 percent) were the key reason for incidents related to cloud computing.
Nevertheless, loss of customer data remains the biggest risk to enterprises with failed cloud implementations, the survey found.
Among the key takeaways from The Economist survey related to cloud security is this: "choosing the right cloud service for the right task, especially when considering the need for greater control over security and data protection."
Hence, fully 61 percent of enterprises surveyed said they use infrastructure-as-a-service provider, including Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine or Microsoft Azure. Fifty-eight percent said they use software-as-a-service offerings while 41 percent said they use either platform- or storage-as-a-service offerings.
Hitachi Data Systems sponsored the survey of 232 global IT executives conducted between January and February 2015
