The research, which polled 300 IT decision-makers from a range of small and medium-sized businesses, and enterprises, found that 73 per cent of respondents were using some form of cloud service, up from 62 per cent in 2012. However, 53 per cent of cloud users stated that cloud’s dependency on internet access was a cause for concern during the migration process.
Claranet’s UK Managing Director, Michel Robert, said that working with a provider with closely integrated cloud and networking services can help to allay concerns about cloud connectivity.
Robert said: “While worries about internet access haven’t held back the overall cloud adoption rate, it’s clear from these figures that there may be implications for the types of workloads and data that some businesses feel confident hosting in the cloud. After all, these services are only as reliable and secure as the network down which they are delivered. To take but one example, business-critical accounting and finance applications, which end-users must be able to access whenever they need them, are still held on in-house infrastructure by 85 per cent of organisations.
“Unreliable, unsecure networks will do little to reassure cloud users, but the connectivity question needn’t be a cause for concern when it comes to cloud provision. It’s possible to circumvent these issues by opting for an MSP that has a strong and deep understanding of network services and has closely integrated cloud and network services. In doing so, end users need only rely on a single supplier with a single SLA for the safe delivery of their applications,” he continued.
“Although it’s possible to outsource these functions to separate providers, businesses risk encountering supplier management issues. With responsibility for uptime split between two or more service providers, with separate SLAs, it is often unclear who is accountable in cases where service is disrupted or has degraded and how to get the service back online.
“As ever more organisations entrust their business-critical workloads, to the cloud, providing a complete, network-integrated service has never been more important, ensuring that customers can safely access their applications as and when they need them,” Robert concluded.
