Cloud Apps Rise Despite Cloud Security Concerns

Cloud Apps Rise Despite Cloud Security Concerns 

Although cloud security continues to be of concern, companies are increasing storage and applications hosted in the cloud.

Availability: 46%, Cost reduction: 41%, Flexible scalability: 36%

20% of respondents have invested 25% of their IT infrastructure in the cloud. For 38% of organizations, cloud investments represent 15% of their overall IT infrastructure investment.

General security risks: 53%, up 8% from last year. Legal and regulatory compliance: 42%, up 13% from last year. Data loss and leakage risks: 40%, up 1% from last year. Integration with existing IT environments: 35%, up 6% from last year. Lack of expertise: 26%, up 10% from last year.

61% of organizations use SaaS models. 53% use IaaS and 39% use PaaS as their cloud service delivery models.

Amazon AWS dominates cloud services and is used by 45% of respondents. Microsoft Windows Azure follows with 39%. The rest are as follows:VMware: 18%, Rackspace: 11%, IBM: 8%, Softlayer/IBM: 5%

Email is the most common corporate information stored in the cloud (44%). Customer data (names, contact information) follows at 31%, sales marketing data also at 31%, and employee and payroll data at 30%.

Only 18% of respondents store intellectual property information in the cloud. 12% store employee health care data in the cloud.

The percentage of organizations with more than half of their applications deployed in the cloud (16%) doubled since last year, when it was 8%.

The five most popular apps deployed in the cloud are: Microsoft Office 365: 41%, Salesforce: 27%, Exchange: 24%, Google Apps: 20%, Dropbox: 17%

91% of organizations are very or moderately concerned about public cloud security. The breakout: 44% are very concerned and 47% are moderately concerned. Despite this, adoption of cloud computing is rising.

52% of respondents believe cloud apps are as secure, or more secure, than on-premise applications, up from 40% last year.