Security has become an accelerator of cloud adoption

Rackspace  has revealed insight from a Vanson Bourne® study into how security drives cloud migration projects. The study, which polled 500 UK IT and business decision-makers who have either been through or are currently planning a cloud migration project, found that security was in the top three motivations for moving to the cloud (38 percent), behind reducing IT costs (61 percent) and increasing resilience or disaster recovery capabilities (50 percent).

 

More than half (58 percent) of businesses surveyed migrated business-critical data to the cloud first, either alone or at the same time as non-critical data, suggesting that cloud security is no longer perceived to be in question by a growing number of organisations. Businesses surveyed aged one to five years demonstrated even more confidence with three quarters (74 percent) migrating business-critical data to the cloud first.

 

Brian Kelly, Chief Security Officer, Rackspace says: “Cloud has long been associated with a loss of control over information, but more and more businesses are now realising this is a misconception. Organisations are increasingly seeing the cloud as a means to keeping their systems and information safe and in the year ahead security will be an accelerator, not an inhibitor, of cloud adoption.”

 

Businesses demonstrating cautious confidence

 

While security is a key motivation for moving to the cloud, organisations recognise that there is no room for complacency. Of respondents surveyed, meeting security and privacy requirements remained the biggest apprehension for those organisations which have moved to the cloud. Nearly half of respondents (48 percent) cited this as a concern, above loss of control to a third party provider (39 percent), cost of a migration (39 percent), application performance and availability (36 percent) and having the in-house skills (27 percent). Fewer respondents who worked with a third party supplier had security concerns (41 percent) than those who didn’t (58 percent), suggesting that using cloud migration specialists can offer peace of mind.

 

Despite continuing concerns around cloud security, the percentage of organisations surveyed that experienced challenges meeting security and privacy requirements was significantly lower (20 percent). Working with migration experts further reduced the likelihood of experiencing challenges (17 percent) compared to those who didn’t (26 percent).

 

Kelly continues: “There is a growing realisation from organisations that buying into a cloud provider also means inheriting a new security team. Many businesses do not have the expertise or budgets to combat a growing number of sophisticated cyber-attacks in-house, but using the cloud - with the support of a team which is able to dedicate a large number of resources to security - will help to keep data safe at a fraction of the cost.”