The report, which questions IT leaders from organisations of various sizes and industries, revealed that 81 per cent of organisations that had adopted no cloud services rated security as a top factor to consider when selecting a potential provider, with core factors such as functionality scoring as poorly as 38 per cent.
Once an organisation has adopted two or more cloud services, however, the importance of security falls to just 44 per cent with factors such as provider reputation becoming much more important overall.
Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks, comments: “This isn’t a case of security becoming less important as you adopt more cloud services – data security is always going to be a priority for both the organisation and the provider. What we’re actually seeing is organisations moving past the ‘fear of the unknown’, as they experience cloud services first-hand.
“We’ve been hearing it for years: security is the biggest inhibitor of cloud services. CSPs have been striving to change that perception, so it’s promising to actually see the attitudes change as the market matures. Once an organisation actually uses a cloud service, they realise that the practicalities of working with a provider – the functionality, the location of their data centres - become far more important than the security risks they once feared.”
Past research has always highlighted security as being a big factor in the decision making process when buying cloud services, but that is changing.
Groucutt concludes: “Ongoing research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) shows cloud adoption levels are rising year on year. Their most recent research highlights that when businesses face major IT refreshes now, most are actively considering cloud services. We’ve transitioned from a time of businesses learning about and testing cloud services, to them really understanding what they need the services for and how to make the most of them.”