eDiscovery Daily Blog

• April 8, 2014

One of the more common trends identified by thought leaders in our recently concluded thought leader series was the continued emergence of the cloud as a viable solution to manage corporate big data.  One reason for that appears to be greater acceptance of cloud security.  Now, there’s a survey that seems to confirm that trend.

According to a recent survey of 1,068 companies conducted by RightScale, Inc. (referenced in the Forbes article Cloud Security Fears Diminish With Experience, Survey Shows, by Joe McKendrick), concern about cloud security diminish as users gain more experience using cloud-based services.  According to the survey, “security remains the most-often cited challenge among Cloud Beginners (31 percent) but decreases to the fifth most cited (13 percent) among Cloud Focused organizations. As organizations become more experienced in cloud security options and best practices, the less of a concern cloud security becomes”.

Other key findings of the survey include:

• 94 percent of respondent organizations are using the cloud in some form, with 29 percent using the public cloud only, 7 percent using private clouds only and 58 percent using both public and private clouds;
• 74 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy and more than half of those are already using both public and private cloud;
• Less than a third of organizations have defined such critical aspects of governance as which clouds can be used, disaster recovery approaches, and cost management;
• The number of respondents who regard cloud security as a significant challenge has decreased among both cloud beginners and cloud pros;
• The cloud “maturity” of respondents ranged from 24 percent who either have no plans to deploy cloud solutions (6 percent) or are only in the planning stage (18 percent) to 47 percent that either have multiple projects or applications already deployed in the cloud (25 percent) or are heavily using cloud infrastructure and are looking to optimize cloud operations as well as cloud costs (22 percent).

You can download the 20 page survey report, chock full of graphs and statistics, here.  It’s a very interesting read.

So, what do you think? How many cloud-based applications does your organization use? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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