8 in 10 IT pros believe believe their data is safer in the cloud

Eight in 10 IT professionals and executives believe that when facing hardware malfunctions and environmental disasters, their organization’s data is safer in the cloud than on premises. In addition, 6 in 10 believe the same when facing a malicious attack, according to Evolve IP.

The survey of more than 1,080 individuals, which provides current cloud adoption trends and future cloud deployment insights, also revealed that 91 percent of all organizations now have at least one service in the cloud.

How safe are cloud services?

Data security is an ongoing concern for IT and this year’s survey asked respondents where they felt their data was safest. When questioned about data environments 50 percent believe that a private cloud is safest when compared to public clouds or an on premise data center.

Specifically, when asked about physical disasters (environmental or hardware failure) 55 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 27.5 percent in a public cloud and 17.5 percent on premise.

Looking at malicious attacks, 52 percent preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data versus 38 percent on premise and 10 percent public cloud.

Other key results of the survey showed that, on average, organizations have nearly five services (4.9) in the cloud, a marked increase from the 2.7 services noted in last year’s results. Servers/data centers, Microsoft Exchange and Office, and disaster recovery were cited as the top deployed cloud services. Additionally, the survey indicated that adoption will continue to be strong, with 74.5 percent of respondents planning on adding new or additional cloud services in the next three years.

The survey results also found that 53 percent of organizations had deployed a cloud solution on their own, up from 43 percent in 2014. However, when asked if they had to start the deployment over, nearly half (48.5 percent) said they would outsource to a solution provider the next time – doubling the total of 24 percent from 2014.

Additional findings

• Just over 1/3 of survey respondents noted that individual departments like Sales, Marketing, Operations and HR had deployed a cloud service independently. However, of those installations, IT was only involved about half of the time.
• Over the last three years, respondents’ impressions of the maturity of the cloud has changed. In 2013, one out of four respondents felt that the cloud was an immature technology. Today, just one in 10 (12 percent) feel the same.
• Five in 10 respondents would prefer to rely on a single cloud provider versus having a unique provider for each service.
• The top services survey respondents expect to deploy in the cloud over the next three years are servers/data centers (22.5 percent), phone systems (21.5 percent) disaster recovery (21 percent), Finance / ERP (18.5 percent) and co-location/backup (17 percent).