Cloud Hosting

Does security continue to be a drag on cloud adoption? About half of the IT professionals participating in a recent survey say yes, but their nervousness isn't on the data itself -- it's about the lack of cybersecurity skills available to manage cloud-borne projects.

That's one of the takeaways of a recent survey of 2,009 IT managers and professionals from Intel Security, which finds that, unsurprisingly, 93% of organizations now employ cloud services in some form. However, 49% reportedly have slowed their cloud adoption due to a lack of cybersecurity skills.

The survey report's authors speculate that this slowdown is creating an increase in shadow IT services, which only increases security risks. Increasingly, the report states, "IT departments are working with users to find and secure acceptable solutions, instead of just blocking them. While good news for those users and departments, this is increasing the burden on security teams."

Any slowdown in cloud adoption is being accompanied by moves to hybrid architectures, the survey also shows. The majority (57%) are running a hybrid public/private architecture, up from last year's 19%. Those using private-only clouds went down, from 51% last year to just 24% this year. Public-only architectures also recorded a big drop, from 30% to just 19%.

This shift to hybrid architecture was accompanied by a decrease in the average number of cloud services in use, which dropped from 43 in 2015, to just 29 in 2016, as organizations appear to be consolidating their cloud applications and services.

The survey also finds a consolidation beginning within the cloud sector, which favors top-tier providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. These vendors may be helping to address cybersecurity skills concerns as well. Executives are more favorable to storing their data in public clouds, seeing these as safer havens than their own data centers. In fact, 74% say they now store some or all of their sensitive data in public clouds. "Trust in public clouds as a safe place to work and store sensitive data continues to increase, and most senior management now appear to have a reasonable understanding of the risks involved," the report's authors state. "The top-tier providers, have been improving their security posture and expanding their security resources, increasing the differences between them and smaller cloud service providers."

High costs and poor value is now the number one operational issue that IT professionals have experienced with their cloud providers in the past year, followed by poor customer service at number two.

Lack of visibility into cloud provider operations remains the top technical issue, as it was last year. Poor availability and uptime has moved up into the top five, increasing from 17% last year to 22% this year.

Shadow IT is another issue looming on the enterprise landscape. IT departments appear to be moving towards more active methods of monitoring and employing technology in an effort to gain better visibility. Next-generation firewalls have replaced database activity monitoring as the most likely method being used this year,increasing from 41% to 49%. Use of web gateways increased from 37% to 41%, and use of cloud access security brokers (CASBs) increased slightly from 32% to 33%. At the same time,more passive methods of detecting Shadow IT activity, such as working with finance, checking license usages, or word or mouth, dropped significantly.

Usage of Platform as a Service (PaaS) is on a growth path, surpassing Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the survey also shows. Overall, PaaS is now in use by 40% of organizations surveyed, up from 21% last year. PaaS usage and hybrid architecture are strongly related, with more than half of those running a hybrid architecture also using PaaS as part of their cloud services. This year's investment plans are 66% SaaS, 64% IaaS, and 59% PaaS, which is consistent with their relative usage rankings.

See the original post here:
Survey hints at cloud computing consolidation, staffing woes - ZDNet