MANAGED SERVICES cloud
£ 17 per cent believed they would adopt cloud services £ 59 per cent said they were likely to £ 14 per cent said they were not sure £ 10 per cent (11 out of 300 organisations or 3 per cent of the survey) said they would not adopt cloud services.
Even though the general trend of cloud adoption looking ahead is very positive the vast majority of participants (68 per cent, and up 3 points from the previous research) still consider that there are applications and data sets that they deem to be unwilling to move to a cloud delivery model at this time. Notably accounts and financial data as well as employee data were stated by around 60 per cent of this subset.
In regard to how cloud services are procured, two thirds of respondents stated that they believe cloud solutions offer them a viable way to change how they currently acquire IT capability. It was their opinion that cost reduction and flexibility of choice drove them to acquire cloud solutions and that that demand outweighed their benefits of their traditional approach to purchasing IT capability. Speed of delivery and ease of use also encouraged a self service mindset. This reiterates a concern written about in White Paper 2 where CIF outlined the need for the IT reseller community to ensure that it has a clear position on its ability to offer, sell, provide, support or partner for the delivery of cloud solutions or they will face increased risk of customer loss.
Where organisations do not foresee cloud changing the way IT is procured (34 per cent), half preferred to keep certain solutions on- premise, 42 per cent believed the benefits were not yet proven and 38 per cent believed that the culture change required inside their company was too great at this time. Interestingly there was no material correlation to size of company in regard to this issue, nor between private vs public sector.
Concerns To present a balanced assessment of Cloud adoption it is equally important to understand the practical as well as the emotive concerns that organisations face. This latest research reiterates the widely held belief that many organisations cite as their number one concern, namely is the mitigation of risks around committing data to be stored and accessed in the cloud. When asked to name their most significant concerns about cloud adoption, users were clear that data security and privacy stood out above all others, cited by 62 and 55 per cent of respondents respectively. It is important to note though that both these values are reduced (by 2 and 7 points respectively) since the last research, though public sector organisations remain the most
concerned at 69 per cent and 55 per cent respectively. Coupled with the aspect of security and privacy of data is the more emotive issue of data sovereignty, i.e., where and under which jurisdiction is data physically stored. The underlying issues that give rise to this concern can range from industry regulatory requirements; concern over international law; heightened sense of loss of control or security risk; through to the actual nature of the application/data in question and internal organisational policy.
In total the physical location of data was identified by 69 per cent of participants as an issue they had to manage. Though in contrast to the issues of data security and privacy, it is the private sector who have the bigger concern around data sovereignty, though both groups rate this as a key issue.
For those organisations where data was required to be stored in a specific location (69 per cent), almost half (47 per cent) required the data to be held in the UK, compared to 6 per cent who accepted the EEA and 4 per cent elsewhere. The remaining 43 per cent believed certain data was best kept on premise. It is of note that there is little diversity of opinion now regardless of size of company or private vs public sector, save that larger private companies are more pro UK hosting than on-premise.
In a separate public survey carried out by the Cloud Industry Forum of 5800 individuals, 64 per cent had concern as to where data would be stored and the vast majority (59 per cent) of the respondents wanted data stored in their own country, with only 28 per cent naturally accepting anywhere within the EEA, and 13 per cent accepting other territories). These individual research activities continue to validate that location and security of data are paramount in cloud service selection.
This is an interesting situation as whilst it reflects natural concerns driven by regulation (such as the Data Protection Act) it also shows a sense of national Law being perceived to provide a higher level of comfort to cloud users, even though many laws within the EEA are unified. This is particularly relevant to cloud adoption as it requires end users to be able to determine where their data will reside in a hosted environment and requires the cloud industry to ensure that it caters for clarity and choice in the design and delivery of SaaS and IaaS solutions as a one-size-fits all delivery will not meet all organisations requirements, regardless of cost benefits.
Models of cloud service adoption White Paper 5 will focus in detail on the factors impacting how and why organizations choose to adopt cloud services in different models. The language of cloud computing is still maturing and awareness is often obscured by vendor marketing, as such many organizations do not consciously label or classify their use of cloud services, but for the purpose of analysing and comparing cloud adoption we will adopt the language of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in part to relate activity to a normalised nomenclature.
Of immediate and obvious note, there is no universal cloud
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www.dcsuk.info I February 2012
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