About 77 percent of information technology professionals trust the cloud more than they did a year ago, but only 34 percent of them believe that executives understand the security risks of the cloud.
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That’s the result of an Intel Securitysurvey based on more than 1,200 IT decision makers. The report concludes that the majority of IT budgets will focus on the cloud but cautions that there needs to be education about how to make the cloud more secure. Only 13 percent of those surveyed said they completely trust public cloud providers to secure sensitive data. That makes sense in our age of major data breaches.
About 23 percent of enterprises said they had experienced data loss or breaches with their cloud service providers. The survey focused on IT professionals from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the U.K, and the U.S. About 72 percent of those surveyed point to compliance as the biggest concern with cloud adoption.
“This is a new era for cloud providers,” said Raj Samani, chief technology officer at Intel Security in Europe, in a statement. “We are at the tipping point of investment and adoption, expanding rapidly as trust in cloud computing and cloud providers grows. As we enter a phase of wide-scale adoption of cloud computing to support critical applications and services, the question of trust within the cloud becomes imperative. This will become integral into realizing the benefits that cloud computing can truly offer.”
The cloud already has a strong impact on almost everyone’s daily lives, as almost everything done on a digital device leverages cloud computing in some way. And cloud use is still growing. In in the next 16 months, 80 percent of respondents’ IT budgets will be dedicated to cloud computing.
A majority of organizations are planning on investing in all-cloud service models, but the majority (81 percent) are planning to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), closely followed by security-as-a-service (79 percent), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) (69 percent), and lastly, software-as-a-service (SaaS) (60 percent).
“The cloud is the future for businesses, governments, and consumers,” said Jim Reavis, CEO of the Cloud Security Alliance, in a statement. “Security vendors and cloud providers must arm customers with education and tools and cultivate strong relationships built on trust, in order to continue the adoption of cloud computing platforms. Only then can we completely benefit from the true advantages of the cloud.”
The survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, a market research company.
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