A survey commissioned by Asigra and conducted by TechValidate has found security as the primary concern with storing data in the cloud.
Of the companies surveyed, security (21%) was the biggest concern, followed by location of company data (7%), cost (3%), cloud service provider going out of business (3%) and user error leading to data loss (3%).
There is a reason if these numbers appear particularly low – the top answer for respondents was “all of the above” (59%).
So, evidently, the majority of respondents can’t choose between various cloudy pain points, but of those who can, security worries once again come out on top.
3% selected user error leading to data loss – a pertinent worry, given data recovery expert Kroll Ontrack released its annual Top 10 Data Disasters list, including one man who ran over his camera and another whose iPad slipped into the sea off a Nigerian oil rig.
As for cloud backup, the majority response was a backup solution which protected both cloud and on-premise applications (69%), as opposed to a cloud-only protection solution which was high performance (52%) or super secure (52%).
Intriguingly, cloud backup was only the method of choice for 24% of companies. Traditional physical device backup (66%) was the most popular, with virtual machine (41%) and tape backup (38%) rounding off the top three.
Similarly, just over a quarter of the companies surveyed (26%) store mission critical data in the cloud, with 42% using the cloud for important/sensitive business data and 36% data of minimal importance.
The research also examined the effects of SaaS on cloud systems.
In terms of data protection, 38% of respondents stated that their SaaS vendor backed them up – the same number said their data was backed up by a corporate infrastructure. Worryingly enough, 8% of respondents said they didn’t protected their cloudy data.
Yet in terms of cloud-based apps, the paradigm changes. 44% said their SaaS vendor backed them up for cloud-based apps, double the number who relied on a corporate backup infrastructure.
There has been plenty of discussion around SaaS – Symform recently called it the “entryway” for cloud platforms – reaffirming it as the most mature cloud market.
To help put this into perspective; Gartner’s latest figures put SaaS at $14.4bn (£9.01bn) by the year’s end, as opposed to the $6.2bn (£3.88bn) infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market and $1.2bn (£754m) platform as a service (PaaS) market.
Recent Ovum research concluded that PaaS today is where SaaS was four years ago – poised to grow exponentially, starting to get a lot of hype and looking more towards private clouds.
In terms of SaaS, Ovum senior analyst Laurant Lachal believes the transition to business process as a service (BPaaS) gathers apace, citing Oracle as an example of moving to BPaaS through strong iPaaS (integration platforms as a service) infrastructure.
“Indeed, iPaaS is to become a key ingredient of the SaaS-to-BPaaS transition”, Lachal wrote. Gartner also oversaw iPaaS figures in the PaaS umbrella, concluding that by 2016 the PaaS market overall will hit $2.9bn (£1.6bn) – plenty of growth for integration platforms as a service and business process as a service.
Do you agree with these research results? Do you store your mission critical data in the cloud, and if not, why not?
