Public cloud adoption growing globally

The use of public cloud is increasing globally, with many organizations seeing substantial process and financial benefits, according to a new report conducted by Vanson Bourne for Barracuda Networks.

On average, organizations have nearly 40% of their infrastructure in the public cloud today, with the expectation to increase this to 70% over the next five years.

Four in 10 reported that their organization relied on public cloud deployments to expand their services, often replicating those over multiple regions, while 30% said they only migrated selected services to the cloud and kept the balance on premises.

Overall, the survey found that organizations are growing more comfortable with hybrid environments that deploy a range of public cloud services along with more traditional on-premises infrastructure.

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).

Of the 450 APAC IT decision makers who participated in the survey, 150 of them were from ASEAN countries Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. The report outlines the respondents’ use of public cloud, benefits of public cloud, challenges with public cloud, and public cloud security.

However, there are still a significant number of organizations that are not clear on the shared security model and the implication to their data and applications.

“The challenges in migrating legacy security appliances and architectures require having the right infrastructure for securing hybrid cloud solutions. Organizations need to select cloud-ready security solutions that are designed for the new architectures and capabilities enabled by public and hybrid cloud adoption,” Barracuda SVP and GM of security Hatem Naguib said.

Nearly all the respondents (99%) said that their organization has seen benefits as a result of moving to the public cloud, including greater scalability and reduced IT expenditures. 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 (63%), followed by the view that this increased security (51%) and helped keep costs down (42%).

But the public cloud also involves fresh challenges. Security remains to be the biggest challenge when it comes to using the public cloud – 71% felt that security concerns restricted their ability to migrate workloads to the public cloud. Nine in 10 (91%) of organizations reported they worried about their use of public cloud, with cyberattacks being the chief concern at 54%. Phishing (50%), DDoS (47%), APTs (45%), and ransomware (41%) were the main threats that most conerned them.