Security concerns, geographic location of cloud data centres and compliance requirements are considered the top three barriers to cloud adoption by local firms.
This is according to a recent Cloud Adoption Survey conducted by ITWeb in partnership with data protection and recovery firm, Pure Storage.
While many cloud service providers implement good security standards and industry certifications, the survey reveals that local executives still hold a perception that cloud data is inherently less secure than data that is housed on-premises.
Other areas of concern were cloud provider lock-in (43%), performance concerns (37%) and integration with existing systems (36%).
According to IDC, cloud adoption is accelerating faster than previously anticipated in SA, with 65% of local CIOs planning to invest in public and private cloud. The fastest-growing market segment is forecast to be cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
While cloud infrastructure offers many benefits for organisations, including a reduction in hardware costs, almost a third (29%) of the survey respondents cited cost and lack of return on investment as additional barriers to cloud adoption.
Revenue increase
Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud revenue will grow by 18% in 2019 and expects companies that adopt cloud services to experience significant improvements in time to market, process efficiency, and significantly cutting expenditures. Together, these benefits should lead to company growth, says the analyst firm.
“Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” explains Sid Nag, research VP at Gartner.
“At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organisations. What we see now is only the beginning, though. By 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three times the growth of overall IT services.”
The top three most important benefits of cloud computing, according to the respondents, are the ability to grow and shrink IT capacity on demand; the ability to rapidly launch new products and services, and convenience for the development teams.
When it comes to the adoption phase of different cloud services, most respondents report they are already in production stage. Specifically: Softwareas- a-Service – 65%, private/ internal cloud – 63%; Storage-as–a-Service 57%; Infrastructure-as-a-Service: – 56%; and Platform-as-a-Service: – 52%.
Backup and recovery
Moving mission-critical apps to the cloud can be a complex processes as organisations to have a need to address challenges around security, data management, and performance.
An overwhelming majority (80%) said they consider the applications they are using in the cloud to be mission-critical for their business, while 12% did not consider them so.
The top three types of business applications being used (or planned to use in future) in the cloud are software development (59%), office productivity tools (58%), and internal enterprise applications (58%).
When it comes to their current backup and recovery solution being able to meet recovery time objectives, just over half (53%) of the respondents indicated they have run tests and found the recovery time to be acceptable. Only 9% reported they are not happy.
Cloud managed back-ups enables the secure, automated disk-to-disk backup and recovery of critical information stored on servers or corporate devices. A vast majority (70%) have considered cloud as a long-term home for their backup data; while only 13% are unsure.
About the survey?
The 2019 ITWeb/Pure Storage Cloud Adoption Survey ran for 14 days on ITWeb during April and was completed by 121 respondents.
Almost 50% of those are decision makers – 18% are C-level executive, while a further 33% are at midmanagement level.
22% of respondents employ 10 000 or more employees: 21% employ between 1000 and 4 999, while 21% employ fewer than 50 people.
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