The latest survey about cloud adoption, usage and perceptions shows that the cloud is really soaring. Still, many firms have yet to reap full benefit from the cloud, and others are putting their organizations at risk in the way they use and manage the cloud.
“Diving into Cloud Services,” which debuted in March from Spiceworks (an IT networking organization) found that 93 percent of companies are using at least one cloud-based service. Additionally, 30 percent of organizations expect more than half of their IT services to be cloud-based within the next two to three years.
This survey was slightly skewed by the dominance of cloud usage for web hosting, the most commonly cited cloud service (76 percent of organizations). However, email hosting, cloud storage and file sharing are all being used by more than half of organizations, which is significant.
Some of the other statistics were not as positive, in terms of corporate productivity and security.
- Only 35 percent of organizations are using online backup and recovery. This is a missed opportunity, since it ensures that in the event of an outage or disaster, precious company resources will be 100% safe. Cloud file storage, while desirable, is not a replacement for cloud file backup, since storage solutions do not include system images and they can potentially be corrupted accidentally by employees working in them. Fortunately, 23 percent of IT professionals are considering cloud-based backup and recovery.
- Adoption of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) currently stands at 20 percent. IaaS, where a company’s IT servers are also hosted in the cloud, is a proven mechanism for reducing infrastructure management burdens, which in turn spurs business innovation. These services often include proactive IT management by a managed services provider, which can further protect corporate resources and reduce cost.
- The biggest cloud storage platform is Dropbox, with 33 percent of organizations deploying it and 78 percent of employees using it without IT approval. These statistics are disconcerting—especially the one about employee usage. The “personal” version of Dropbox, which many organizations and most users adopt due to its low price, lacks the administrative controls for optimal file security.
Furthermore, since Dropbox is a siloed (storage only) application, companies lose the enhanced collaboration and sharing benefits of unifying storage with a productivity suite, such as Microsoft OneDrive and Office 365 (used by 36 percent of organizations). When paired with IaaS from a single provider (in this case, Microsoft Azure), organizations benefit even more, including end-to-end, native integration and security.