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.