Cloud Confusion for Organizations – Report

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Security concerns are dragging down public cloud migrations for some companies.

According to a recent survey by Pure Storage, there are companies that have moved their workloads from public clouds back to on-premises IT locations due to security concerns.

Across North America and Asia Pacific/Japan, 40% of the businesses in the survey have made the move back to on-premises while 65% of the companies in the EMEA have reduced public cloud use over the past year due to security concerns.

Among the reasons for not using public clouds, survey responders cited security concerns as the biggest drawback for public cloud deployments (47%) followed by cost (29%).

Pure Storage's survey said that the cost savings associated with public cloud aren't as compelling or as clear-cut as organizations initially think.

Companies are lured into the public cloud by the perceived cost savings (54%), but, in addition to security, they move back to on-premises when those savings don't fully materialize, according to the survey. Additional public cloud drivers included availability (50%) and ease of use (50%).

The survey also found that while there is momentum afoot for public cloud, private cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS) -- and to a lesser degree, on premise -- organizations aren't sure where to put their workloads.

While public cloud is set to grow over the next 18 to 24 months -- 61% of the survey respondents said their use would increase -- businesses are running 41% of their applications on traditional on-premises IT, which was higher than both public cloud (26%) and private cloud (24%).

Over the same time frame, 52% of the companies in the survey said their private-cloud use would increase while 35% said their use of traditional on-premises IT would increase.

Similar workload patterns were in play for storage with an average of 39% using traditional on-premises compared to 26% for public cloud and 24% for private cloud.

The survey also tackled digital transformations and found that data was both a driver and a barrier to progress. Legacy storage infrastructures and technical complexities were cited as bottlenecks to digital transformations.

Digital solutions account for slightly less than half (47%) of revenues for organizations through either customer-facing applications or back-office functions. The top two digital solutions were platforms for internal communications (74%) and the management of records and purchase history (72%).

The survey was conducted with more than 90,000 IT employees across 24 countries.

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation