By far, the biggest concern IT workers have about their organization’s use of cloud computing is security. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents cited security as their top concern about the cloud. But half also mentioned costs (58%) and reliability (50%) as points of attention.
State of the Cloud: A Security Perspective, a report by Dark Reading released in March 2022, surveyed decision-makers with IT job titles at organizations using cloud services. Those organizations include companies of all sizes from a variety of industries, including technology, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and education.
Reliability looms because of its importance — employees and customers must have access to a company’s tools to stay open for business — and because for cloud applications, reliability is largely beyond the control of the organization. That lack of control can certainly increase anxiety levels.
The only other concerns rising in double digits are cloud computing skills of the workforce (26%), insufficient cloud functionality (10%) and placing too much data in the cloud (10%). These, like reliability, all align with security, the responsibility of which is shared between the data owner and the cloud provider. As cloud adoption across all industries grows and matures, IT staff are learning how to secure data and configure cloud access for maximum security, which may alleviate the stress enough to raise concerns about “too much data” to 10% of respondents. to limit.
On a positive note, only 6% of respondents say their service level agreements are inadequate or that their service providers are trying to upsell them with unwanted cloud services. Indeed, a whopping 2% of respondents say they have no worries and are completely satisfied with their cloud services. That’s a response we’d all like to see grow.
Download the full report for more data and insights.
