INTELLIGENT CLOUD most common concern about using cloud services in Japan was the skills required by IT security staff .
By industry , utilisation of cloud services was lowest in government 27 % and education 19 %. This appears to be related to trust and control issues in both industries . Governments were least likely to consider their data safe within the public cloud . Educational institutions were least likely to think that the public cloud is secure from hackers . Both industries were concerned about their ability to maintain identity and access control .
By industry , use of private-only cloud was highest in engineering 30 %, primarily due to compliance concerns , and government 29 % organisations , due to trust and control issues , as mentioned above . Purely private cloud infrastructures were lowest in services companies 16 %, due to concerns over IT security skills , and media organisations 17 %, who had issues with insufficient visibility of their security posture .
Public-only usage was highest in services companies 28 %. Pure public cloud usage was lowest in insurance 9 % and retail 12 %. Retailers , not surprisingly in their price-competitive industry , were primarily concerned about costs . The top concern of insurance companies was compliance , specifically the location of cloud service providers ’ datacentres and data stores outside of the country of operations .
Private-only cloud usage remained highest in the GCC including Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates 30 % and Mexico 28 %. GCC organisations were much more concerned about public cloud costs and the ability of cloud service providers to meet service level agreements than average .
Japan had the lowest usage of private clouds , at just 7 %, once again due to higher than average concerns about staff security skills .
Public-only usage remained highest in Australia 33 % and Canada 32 %. Australians were primarily concerned about the challenges of having consistent security controls integrated across both
80 % organisations now following a cloud-first strategy
traditional and virtualised infrastructures . Canadians were primarily concerned about maintaining compliance across hybrid services . Pure public cloud usage was lowest in Brazil 4 %, Mexico 8 %, and the UK 10 %. Brazilians have the highest usage of hybrid architectures , at 74 %. Mexican organisations are high private cloud users , as mentioned above . In the UK , low public cloud usage appears to be predominantly a trust issue , as they reported the lowest opinions of the public cloud ’ s abilities to maintain identity and access control , and to keep their organisation ’ s data safe and secure from hackers .
More than 80 % of the organisations surveyed stated that they are now following a Cloud First strategy , where priority is given to applications that can be purchased as a service or deployed in the cloud over requiring hardware and physical servers and systems to be deployed in the datacentre . Those with a Cloud First strategy believe that their IT budgets will be 80 % cloud services in less than 12 months , while those without such a strategy think it will be closer to 20 months .
The rate of cloud investment and adoption continues to be significant , but overall organisations do not seem to be getting much closer to the point where 80 % of their IT budget will be comprised of cloud services . Comparing last year ’ s responses , the average number of months until they think this will happen dropped from 16 months to 15 months , indicating last year ’ s respondents were overly- optimistic . Perhaps most notable , the percentage of IT professionals who stated that they do not think their IT budget will ever be 80 % cloud was cut by half , from 12 % in 2015 to just 6 % in 2016 .
( Excerpted from Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky , The state of cloud adoption and security by Intel Security )
Raj Samani is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Intel Security for Europe , Middle East , Africa
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