Barracuda Networks, Inc. announced key findings from a new global research report, “Unlocking the Benefits of Public Cloud.” Commissioned by Barracuda and conducted by Vanson Bourne, the research surveyed 1,300 IT decision makers from organizations using public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and from Asia Pacific (APAC) including India. The report outlines the respondents’ use of public cloud, benefits of public cloud, challenges with public cloud, and public cloud security.
“This report highlights the ongoing increase in public cloud use in India, with many organizations seeing substantial process and financial benefits. Even though most Indian respondents (93%) fully understand the public cloud security responsibility, there is still some skepticism of migrating to the public cloud due to security reasons,” said Senior Director Product Management, Barracuda Networks, Anshuman Singh.
Background Public Cloud Use
The respondents’ use of public cloud is on the rise, as is their sophistication in working within the cloud. On average, Indian organizations have nearly 46 percent of their infrastructure in the public cloud today.
In all of APAC, more than half (52%) of respondents believe that their public cloud IaaS provider completely successfully offers strong protection of access to applications in the cloud. Just under nine in ten (89%) respondents report that their organisation uses public cloud for data storage, while, almost two thirds (65%) say the same for data recovery.
In APAC, four in 10 reported that their organization relied on public cloud deployments to expand their services, often replicating those over multiple regions, while 24 percent said they only migrated selected services to the cloud and kept the balance on premises. Additionally, Indian respondents reported that 27.96% of their organisation’s annual IT budget is spent on public cloud, on average
Public Cloud Benefits
100% of respondents report that their organisation has seen benefits as a result of moving to the public cloud, with over half reporting that their organisation has seen improved security of applications (55%) and greater scalability (55%). Furthermore, of respondents whose organisation uses more than one public cloud provider, 96% believe that they would see benefits from using fewer service providers.
The survey found, on average, that organizations didn’t use a single cloud provider for everything, and cited a number of reasons for this: Top of mind was that different providers had different strengths (69 percent), followed by the view that this increased security (58 percent) and helped keep costs down (47 percent).
Public Cloud Challenges
Security remains to be the biggest challenge when it comes to using the public cloud – 78 percent in India felt that security concerns restricted their ability to migrate workloads to the public cloud. In APAC nine in 10 (90 percent) of organizations reported they worried about their use of public cloud, with cyberattacks being the chief concern at 57 percent. Phishing (53 percent), DDoS (48 percent), APTs (50 percent), and ransomware (43 percent) were the main threats that most conerned them.
Over half (53%) in India had experienced at least one cyberattack. The challenge with security was further heightened with the information organizations are storing in public clouds: Of respondents whose organisation stores data in the public cloud in APAC, more than nine in ten (92%) say that their organisation stores sensitive data in the public cloud, with around six in ten (61%) who admit that their organisation stores personal employee data in the public cloud.
Only slightly fewer say the same for customer (53%) or employee (51%) bank details, although this is likely to be higher (57% and 59%) in India, which could be due to a higher level of confidence in public cloud within the country.
Public Cloud Security
The Shared Responsibility Security Model – wherein cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, while organizations using the cloud are responsible for the security of what they put in the cloud – is not new, and 93 percent in India felt they fully understood their cloud security responsibilities. The percentage was much lower in Hong Kong 58%, and was 84% in the US.
Additionally in India, 77 percent were confident that their move to the cloud was secure, with three in five – 71 percent – responding that they had included additional security solutions in their public cloud infrastructure.
